9. JAMIE #2
He's looked at me with frustration, with humor, with hunger, with a tenderness he doesn't perform for anyone. I have seen him quiet with anger — the jaw, the shortened sentences, the voice dropping.
This is not that. This is what's on the other side of all of that. His eyes are flat and his jaw is locked and he's holding Greg by the collar with one hand.
Greg opens his mouth.
Jackson hits him.
One punch. His right fist, and it connects with Greg's face, and the sound is nothing like what I'd expected, brief and dense, and Greg goes down. Straight down, no stumble, no dramatic stagger, just down, landing hard on the mall floor, his hand up over his face.
Two mall security officers appear from the direction of the food court, moving fast, already reaching for radios.
Someone nearby has a phone out. A mother steers her kid by the shoulders in the other direction.
Greg is on the floor, his face covered, and he's already starting to talk, loud, spiraling.
"She's carrying my child — she stole my — this man attacked me, I want him arrested, she's been hiding from me for months and this — this is assault, you saw it, everyone saw it — "
Security reaches Greg. They're getting hands under his arms, hauling him upright, and he's still raving, the whole constructed narrative spilling out in the wrong order, pieces of it, the baby and the school and nine months of obsessive math he's been doing in his head.
Jackson looks at him.
When he speaks, his voice is controlled in the way that uses more effort than shouting.
"I'll see you in court, asshole." A beat. "I told you I'd get you."
He turns away from Greg and turns toward me.
The fury drains from his face and something sharp and immediate replaces it, because he's reading my face and my body and everything I'm still holding in my muscles, and his hand comes up toward my cheek —
The cramp hits.
It starts deep, lower than low, a clenching that radiates outward through my pelvis and up my spine in a wave that steals the air from my lungs.
It's not a kick. I know her kicks, know every variation of them — the sharp jabs, the rolling pressure, the hiccups. This is not that.
This is something tightening from the inside out and it does not stop, it builds, and I fold sideways with one hand on the wall because I cannot put my chin to my chest with my belly in the way, and my vision goes white at the edges.
"Jackson—"
He's already moving. He was already reaching for me and my voice changes and he's there, one hand on my back and one on my arm, taking my weight, and I can't straighten up, I can't get my body to unbend from around the pain.
"I've got you." His voice is close. "Talk to me. What — "
"Something's wrong." My hand presses into my belly, hard, feeling for her. "Something's wrong."
"Okay." He's scanning, I can hear it in the way his voice lifts. He's not talking to me anymore: "Someone call an ambulance. Now. Call an ambulance."
The second cramp hits before the first has finished, and this one is worse, and I make a sound I don't mean to make, and I feel my knees starting to go and then I'm not standing anymore, I'm against the wall and then against Jackson, and the floor is underneath us, and he's got both arms around me and his voice is in my ear.
"I'm here. I'm here."
Somewhere behind us, Greg is still talking. His voice is muffled now, directed at the security officers. Someone is saying something about the ambulance, the word cutting through the ambient noise of the mall.
A child asks her father a question and the father doesn't answer. I hear all of this the way you hear things through water — present, identifiable, belonging to a world that has continued without me.
"I'm here." Jackson's hand moves to mine, covers it, holds it. His grip is careful and deliberate, the way he handles me when he's remembering the size difference. "The ambulance is coming. I've got you."
The pain crests and I try to breathe through it the way the prenatal videos said to breathe, the ones I watched on my phone with Jackson at two in the morning when neither of us could sleep, and he'd watched with his arms crossed and asked clarifying questions in the way he does when he's memorizing something.
The breathing does almost nothing. The pain is a fact, occupying every available space.
My hand stays on my belly. I'm waiting for her. For the roll, the elbow pressing against my palm, the hiccup that shakes my whole midsection. I wait through the cramp and through the cramp subsiding and through the moment after when my body hangs in the exhausted silence between contractions.
She's not moving.
All afternoon she's been moving. The slow roll at the baby store window, the kick for Jackson's hand, the constant internal rearrangement that I've been living with for months.
Now my hand is on her and she's still and the stillness is its own kind of pain, a new one, settling into the space the cramp has just vacated.
"Jackson." My voice comes out wrong. "She's not moving."
His hand tightens on mine. "Just breathe, little one."
"She's not—" Another cramp begins its gather, the warning pressure building low and deep. "She's not moving, I can't feel her?—"
"I'm here." His voice doesn't change but his grip tightens again, steadying me, and I can hear him talking over my head to someone, fast and direct, giving our location, describing what's happening, but his hand doesn't leave mine for a second of it, and it's the hand that I'm holding onto.
The cramp breaks over me and somewhere outside, at the distant edge of what I can hear through the pain, there might be sirens.
Jackson says "I'm here" again, and I hold his hand, and I press my palm against my belly, and I wait for her to move, and she doesn't, and the next cramp is already building in the dark.
Please. Please don't let me lose our baby.