10. JACKSON
JACKSON
The paramedics reach us first. My hand has to let go of Jamie's hand so they can work.
My hand doesn't want to open. The fingers resist the command to release her, and I have to force them apart one by one, and then she's not in my grip anymore and someone else is taking her pulse and asking her questions and I'm standing here watching them do things I can't do.
They load her onto a stretcher. I'm beside her, matching their pace as they move toward the exit, and Jamie's hand finds mine again and grips, and the grip is tight enough to tell me she's scared, and I can see it in her face too — the way her eyes keep darting to mine and then away, like she's checking to make sure I'm still here.
The ambulance is too small for me. Everything in this vehicle is designed for people who are not six foot seven, and I fold myself into the space they give me, knees bent, shoulders hunched, because leaving is not an option and this is the space available.
Jamie's face during the ride. That's what I watch. The contractions come in waves, and I can see each one building in her expression before it hits — the way her jaw tightens, the way her breathing changes, the way her hand crushes mine when the pain peaks.
The monitors attached to her arm beep numbers I don't know how to read. One of the paramedics watches the screen and makes notes and talks into his radio, and I catch fragments — "thirty-seven weeks," "contractions," "fetal distress" — but the words don't connect into anything useful.
Data without context is just noise.
The ambulance moves through traffic like it's swimming through honey. Every red light, every car that doesn't move out of the way fast enough, every second that passes without us getting where we need to go sits in my chest like a weight.
I am a man who acts, and the only action available to me right now is holding her hand.
So I hold her hand.
Jamie's eyes find mine between contractions. "Jackson — "
"I'm here."
"I can't feel her moving."
"The doctors will know what to do."
"What if — "
"I'm here, little one." My thumb moves across her knuckles. "I'm not going anywhere."
She nods, but I can see the fear underneath, and it matches the fear sitting in my own chest, the cold patient kind that settles in and waits.
The ambulance doors open and medical staff rushes to meet us.
Doctors, nurses, people in scrubs who take over immediately, and Jamie is wheeled away from me — fast, efficient, voices calling out medical terms I don't process because I'm too busy trying to keep up, trying to stay beside the gurney, my hand still reaching for hers.
Then they stop me.
A nurse steps in front of me, her hand on my arm. "Sir, you need to wait here. We'll come get you as soon as we can."
"I need to be with her."
"They need to assess her first. They need to deliver the baby."
The words land. Deliver the baby. Now.
"She's thirty-seven weeks," the nurse says, and her voice is kind but firm. "The baby is viable. But they need to move quickly."
Jamie's face as she's wheeled through the doors. Her eyes on mine, her hand reaching, and then the doors close and she's gone and I'm standing in a hospital corridor alone.
The corridor stretches in both directions, fluorescent lights overhead, linoleum under my feet, and there is nowhere for me to go and nothing for me to do.
I don't sit. The chairs in the waiting area are too small and too far from the doors Jamie disappeared through, and sitting feels wrong when she's somewhere behind those doors in pain.
I pace instead — four steps toward the elevators, four steps back toward the doors, and the distance is not enough for my legs but it's the space I have.
My hands have nothing to hold. I put them in my pockets, take them out, fold my arms across my chest, let them hang at my sides.
None of these positions feel right. My hands were made to hold things, to fix things, to act, and there is nothing here that needs holding or fixing or acting upon.
There is only waiting.
The word sits in my body like something foreign. I have never been in a situation I couldn't solve with my hands. Every crisis in our history — the school, the bathroom, the broken pump, Greg's face — I acted and the problem got solved. Action and solution. Cause and effect. Simple.
This is not simple. This is Jamie behind doors I cannot open and a baby who stopped moving and doctors doing things I don't understand, and my hands are empty and useless and I hate every second of this hallway and this silence and the not-knowing.
Fear. The word arrives unbidden, unwelcome, accurate. Not the adrenaline fear of the mall or the parking lot — something deeper, colder. The fear of a man who has found the thing he cannot lose and is now confronting the possibility that he might lose it.
I pace. Four steps. Four steps back. The motion does nothing to relieve the pressure in my chest or the restless energy in my limbs, but it's movement, and movement feels closer to action than standing still.
Time passes. I don't know how much. Could be minutes. Could be hours. A nurse walks by and doesn't stop. A doctor enters a different room. Someone's phone rings down the hall. Every sound that isn't my name being called is irrelevant and agonizing.
The doors Jamie went through remain closed. No one comes out. No one goes in. The silence from behind them is complete and terrible.
My chest feels tight. Like there's not enough air in this hallway, or like my lungs have forgotten how to expand properly. I try to breathe deeper, and it helps for about three seconds, and then the tightness returns.
This is helplessness. This weight in my limbs, this restless energy with nowhere to go, this need to DO something when there is nothing to do.
I hate it. I hate standing here while someone else holds Jamie's hand, while someone else makes the decisions that matter, while someone else determines whether my family lives or dies.
My family. Jamie and the baby. My family. The family I might lose while standing in this hallway watching doors that won't open.
A woman at the nurses' station answers a phone call. A janitor wheels a cart past me. The elevator dings and someone gets off, but it's not anyone who matters.
The world continues around me like everything is normal, like there isn't a woman and a baby fighting for their lives thirty feet away, and the normalcy is obscene.
My hands clench into fists in my pockets. The motion is automatic, a response to stress I don't usually acknowledge, and I force them to open again because there is nothing here worth hitting and hitting would not solve this anyway.
More time passes. The clock on the wall moves its hands but the numbers don't register. Minutes feel like hours feel like minutes. The corridor exists in its own dimension where time moves according to rules I don't understand.
Then someone comes for me.
A doctor in scrubs approaches from the direction of the doors. She's walking toward me with purpose, and the walk from where she started to where I'm standing takes three seconds, and those three seconds are the longest of my life.
"Are you here for Jamie Coleman?"
"Yes, I'm the baby's father."
"Both mother and baby are safe and healthy. You have a daughter."
Something gives way in my chest — the rigid control I've been holding, the locked jaw, the tension in my shoulders that's been keeping me upright for however long I've been standing in this hallway. My breath comes out in a sound I don't recognize as my own.
"They're both okay?"
"Both doing fine. Jamie's tired, but she's stable. The baby is healthy. Six pounds, two ounces. All her fingers and toes."
My hands, which have been fists in my pockets, open. The relief is enormous, physical, still settling into my body like something I need to learn how to carry.
"Can I see them?"
"Right this way."
The walk to Jamie's room feels different than the pacing. My legs are lighter, or maybe heavier. The relief is still moving through me, loosening things I didn't realize were tight, and whatever my eyes are doing, I don't examine it. I just keep walking.
The doctor stops at a door, opens it. "They're right in here."
I enter the room and Jamie is in the bed, and she looks exhausted and pale and smaller than usual against the white hospital pillows, but alive.
Her eyes find mine and she smiles — weak, tired, real — and the smile does something to my chest that I'm getting used to but will probably never understand.
I cross to her, lean down, kiss her. Not desperate this time. Quiet. A kiss that says you're here, you're okay, I found you. She tastes like hospital and exhaustion and Jamie underneath all of it, and she leans into the kiss despite how tired she is.
"Hey," she whispers against my mouth.
"Hey."
Then I see the bassinet beside the bed.
Our daughter.
She's impossibly small. I have held Jamie, who is five foot two and the smallest person in my life, and this baby makes Jamie look substantial.
When I reach for her, my hands — the same hands that span Jamie's entire back, that broke Greg's face in the mall, that grip a steering wheel like it's a toy — those hands pick up something that weighs less than anything I've ever held.
I support her head the way the prenatal videos showed us, my palm covering her entire back, and she fits in my forearm like she was designed for it.
The awareness remains — the same self-consciousness about my size that I felt in the bathroom nine months ago, but magnified.
She has Jamie's nose. Dark hair that sticks up in directions that make no sense. Her fingers are perfect and tiny, wrapped around nothing, and when I touch one with the tip of my finger, her whole hand looks like it could disappear.
She smells like something I don't have words for. Clean and warm and entirely new.
Jamie is watching me hold the baby. When I glance at her, she's got an expression on her face I can read now, after nine months of learning her, and what it says makes my chest expand past its usual capacity.
I look at Jamie — really look at her. Exhausted, beautiful, alive in this hospital bed with our daughter in my arms, and something needs to be said that I should have said months ago.
"I love you."
Three words. No preamble. No speech about when I knew or how it happened. Just the fact, delivered the way I deliver all facts.
Tears start in her eyes, but not sad tears.
"I love you," she says back.
The exchange is simple. Months of everything we've built is behind those words, and the simplicity is the point. We look at each other across the small space between the bed and where I'm standing, and the looking is enough.
I settle the baby carefully in the bassinet, my hands enormous and precise around her tiny body. Make sure she's secure, that the blanket is covering her properly, that she's safe.
Then I turn back to Jamie.
I kneel and reach into my pocket. The ring. I have been carrying this ring since the day we found out she was pregnant.
Every day, through work and meals and nights in our bed and the mall today and the ambulance and the waiting in that hallway. I bought it two days after the doctor told us about the baby, and I've been carrying it every day since, waiting for the moment.
The moment is now.
Jamie sees the ring and her hand goes to her mouth, and tears start falling again.
"Jamie, I love you and the life we're building together. Will you marry me?"
"Yes."
One word. The way all our biggest moments have been one word. Okay. Yes. The single syllables that change everything.
I take her hand — the left one — and slide the ring onto her finger. My enormous hands, her small finger, and the ring fits because of course it fits. I know her hands. I've been holding them for months.
Then I lean up and kiss her.
Her hand finds my face the way it always does, and this kiss is not passionate or urgent. It's the kiss of a man who almost lost everything today and didn't, who now has everything, who is saying that with his mouth because words have never been his best tool.
Her lips are soft and warm and taste like tears and Jamie, and my hand cups the back of her head, and somewhere beside us our daughter sleeps in her bassinet, and the hospital room exists around us but doesn't matter, and this kiss is the end of the worst day of our lives and the beginning of everything.