33. Epilogue
Epilogue
Greer
The NHL Draft is on television in the front parlor of the brownstone when my water breaks.
I am at thirty-nine weeks and three days.
I have been at the brownstone full-time since the second week of June. Lena drove up on the Tuesday before the Draft. My mother flew up on the Wednesday. The plan, by my obstetrician's account, was that we would induce on Monday if I had not delivered on my own by then.
I am at the kitchen island with my mother helping me up onto the high stool when the warm slow give in the small of my back happens, and then the front of me, and then the slow steady rush down my legs onto the tile of the brownstone's kitchen.
My mother says, very calmly: "Oh."
Indie stands up off the couch.
Kieran is across the kitchen in three steps.
He says, quietly: "Greer."
"It's time."
"Okay."
"I am — "
"I know."
He puts his hand on the small of my back. My mother slides a towel under my feet. Lena is already on her phone with the obstetrician's office. Indie has the hospital bag I packed in March in her hand by the time I have stopped staring at the floor.
I look up at Kieran.
I say. "I love you."
He says, "I know. We've got this."
He kisses me on the forehead.
We go.
* * *
The car ride to the hospital is twelve minutes.
I sit in the passenger seat of the SUV with Indie's hand on the back of my shoulder from the back row and Lena in the seat next to her and my mother in the seat behind Kieran.
We do not, in the twelve minutes, talk. The Draft on the radio in the SUV is on the second round.
Kieran pulls up to the labor-and-delivery entrance at the hospital at nine-eighteen.
A nurse meets us at the door with a wheelchair.
She is in her fifties, with reading glasses on a beaded chain and the careful steady voice of someone who has been doing this work for a long time.
She looks at me. She looks at my paperwork on the tablet in her hand.
She says, in the small clean professional tone the senior labor-and-delivery nurses use when a patient walks in: Hello, Greer.
I'm Marta. You're going to be in room 412 today.
We have you on file. The OB is on her way in.
"Thank you, Marta."
"Who is coming up with you?"
"All four of them."
She looks at Kieran, at my mother, at Lena, at Indie. She nods.
"Four is the limit. You picked yours."
"Yes."
"Then let's get you upstairs."
* * *
The room is bigger than I expected. A bed in the center. A small couch on one wall. A reclining chair Lena takes one look at and claims. A whiteboard with my name on it in marker — Greer Callahan / OB: Dr. Sarah Whitman / Estimated delivery: ??
The nurse helps me into the gown. The OB on call arrives at ten. Dr. Whitman arrives at ten-thirty in her own scrubs, in the careful steady mode I have known her in since the morning of October twenty-ninth. She checks me. She says: You are at five. Move around. Walk the corridor. We have time.
Kieran walks the corridor with me.
We walk it slowly, me in the gown with the IV pole and the hospital-issue grippy socks the nurse has put on my feet, him in the suit pants and the cotton tee and the dress shoes he put on at the brownstone before he knew where the morning was going. He keeps his hand on the small of my back.
The corridor on labor-and-delivery on a Friday morning in late June is full of the quiet hum a labor-and-delivery floor has at this hour, with the soft beeping of monitors behind every door and the murmur of the nurses' station and the careful steady steps of a husband walking his wife through a contraction.
The labor takes seven hours.
I breathe through it. I move through it.
I take the pain in the slow steady waves my body has been doing the work of taking it in since one in the afternoon.
Lena holds one of my hands. My mother holds the other.
Indie sits at the foot of the bed in the chair she has been in since ten.
Kieran moves with me through every wave, palm at the small of my back when I walk, hand on the side of my face when I lean on him, the other hand always finding the curve where she has been turning under our hands for sixteen weeks.
At four-thirteen on a Friday afternoon in late June in Boston, in a room on the fourth floor of a hospital, with the Draft still on the television, I push for the last time, and the small body inside my body for nine months and six days slides out into Dr. Whitman's hands.
The room is quiet for the half-second every delivery room is quiet between the body and the cry.
Then she cries.
The baby cries the small new cry of a baby six pounds eleven ounces, in a labor-and-delivery suite, into the soft warm summer air of a city she is going to grow up in.
Dr. Whitman puts her against my chest.
She is everything I have been carrying for nine months and six days — small and warm and impossibly real against my collarbone, with her head against the place under my chin where I have been touching with my own hand at three in the morning every night for eight weeks.
She smells like nothing I have ever smelled before.
I look up at Kieran.
He is at my shoulder.
His face is the face of a forty-seven-year-old man who has, in the last fifteen seconds, become a father for the second time in his life — twenty-six years after the first.
He is crying.
He puts his palm, very gently, flat against the back of her tiny head and stays there for a long second without saying anything.
When he speaks, it is low. "Hi, baby."
He kisses the top of her head, then mine.
I look up over his shoulder.
Indie is at the foot of the bed.
She has been crying since I went into labor. Lena and my mother are on either side of her. She is the most overwhelmed I have ever seen my best friend.
I say, very quietly: "Indie. Come up here."
She comes around to the side of the bed Kieran is not on, and she sits down on the edge of the mattress.
She looks at the baby.
She does not, at first, touch her.
I say, "Indie. Hold out your hand."
She holds out her hand. I take the baby's small new closing fist and put it against the inside of Indie's finger. The baby grips it the way babies do.
Indie does not move.
Then her face softens.
She whispers into the baby's small ear: "I am your sister."
I close my eyes.
Kieran's hand is, still, on the back of her head. My mother is at the foot of the bed with a tissue at her face. Dr. Whitman is at the side of the room writing into her chart with the careful steady efficiency of someone who has been doing this work for a long time.
Indie's other hand goes, slowly, against the baby's back.
She looks at me.
"Have you and Dad decided on a name?"
I look at Kieran.
He looks at me. He has not, in nine months, said his late wife's name and the baby's name in the same sentence.
He nods, once.
I look at Indie.
"Cara," I say. "After your mom."
Indie does not, for a long second, move.
Then she presses her forehead, very gently, against Cara's forehead.
She says, into the small space: "Welcome, Cara."
Then, to me: "Thank you, Greer."
"Indie."
"Yes."
"Thank you for being in this room."
* * *
Mikko comes by the hospital at seven that night. He brings whiskey for Kieran and a small soft stuffed bear in the team's blue and gold for Cara. He hugs Indie. He hugs my mother. He hugs me, briefly, with Cara still on my chest.
He looks down at her.
He says, in his careful steady captain's voice: "Doc."
I laugh.
He goes.
* * *
Around nine, when my mother and Lena have gone down the hall to find dinner and Indie has driven the short way home to feed her cat and Kieran is at the small couch on the wall with his back against the cushion and his eyes closed and Cara is asleep against my chest, the OB on the night shift comes in with my paperwork.
She is in her fifties, in scrubs, with the same careful, steady voice the morning nurse Marta had.
She says, quietly: "I have your discharge plan. Forty-eight hours unless something changes. You and the baby are both healthy. Doctor Whitman left you the schedule for two-week follow-up."
"Thank you."
"There is also a card on your file. Hospital protocol — we collect family information in the first hour. The nurse who took it was kind enough to write what she had down."
She hands me the card.
It is the small white card the labor-and-delivery floor uses for the family-information form. Marta has filled it out in her own handwriting.
Baby's father: Kieran Larsen.
Baby's name: Cara Indie Larsen.
I look up at Kieran on the couch.
He is asleep.
I look at the OB.
I say: "Thank you. The card is correct."
She nods.
She goes.
I sit in the hospital bed with Cara asleep against my chest and the small white card in my hand and the streetlights of late- June Boston outside the window, and I do not, for a long stretch, move.
* * *
A week later, Kieran has the hip surgery he has been postponing since 2018.
He scheduled it in March, the week after he signed the extension, with the surgeon at MGH who has been telling him for two years that the next surgery would not be the same surgery.
The team's doctors signed off. The franchise's insurance approved it in May.
But Kiernan would not schedule it before the baby was born.
Cara is six days old when he goes under.
His hip has held him up at every podium and every bench and every press conference of the last fifteen years.
The surgeon at MGH has been doing this specific revision for thirty-one years.
The surgery is four hours. I sit in the waiting room with Indie on one side of me and Lena on the other and Cara asleep across my lap.
He comes out at three in the afternoon.
The surgeon tells me he did well and he will be on crutches for six weeks.
Once we are able, we take the elevator up to recovery.
He is in a hospital bed in a private room on the eighth floor, in a hospital gown with the IV in his arm and his hair flat against the pillow.
He sees me.
He sees Cara in the carrier on my chest.
He says, low: "Hi."
"Hi."
"How did she do?"
"She slept through the whole thing."
"Good."
He looks at her. He looks at me. His face is the slow, tender face I have been seeing every day for six days.
He says: "Greer?"
"Yes."
"In the fall, when I am off the crutches."
I look at him. His hair is still flat against the pillow from the anesthesia.
He has an IV in his arm and a hospital gown on and he is asking me this from a recovery bed six days after our daughter was born because it is the first quiet moment he has had since then and he is not, apparently, a man who waits once he has decided.
"Marry me," he says.
This is, I think, the most Kieran Larsen thing he has ever done in front of me.
Not the gala, not the kitchen the morning after Thanksgiving, not the eight months of doing every hard thing correctly.
This. From a hospital pillow in a recovery gown on the eighth floor of MGH, because a man who has been patient for nine months has run out of reasons to wait.
He is looking at me the way he looked at me the morning I walked into the practice facility, and he understood what the rest of the season was going to cost him. Like a man who has already done the reckoning and is at peace with the number.
I have said yes to a lot of things in nine months that I did not know I was saying yes to. I said yes to the gala suite, and I said yes to the form with the twelve fields, and yes to Indie's hand on Cara's back, and yes to the name on the card.
This is the yes that contains all the others.
"Yes," I say.
He smiles. It is the small private smile that has, in eight months, become the one expression on his face I am sure is only ever for me.
I lean down with Cara still in the carrier and kiss him on the forehead, the way he has kissed me on the forehead at the door of every room I have left him in since November.
"I love you," I say.
"I love you."
Cara, between us, makes the small, unfocused new baby sound she has been making for six days.
I sit back in the chair. The room is quiet. He closes his eyes again, the anesthesia pulling him back under, and I sit with Cara asleep against my collarbone and the afternoon light going gold across the bed and the low murmur of the corridor outside.
Outside this room, Indie is in the waiting room on the second floor with Lena. My mother has gone back to the brownstone to start dinner. In six weeks, he will be off the crutches. In the fall, I am going to marry him in whatever form that takes, in whatever room, with whoever is in it.
None of that is the thing making my chest feel the way it feels right now.
What is making my chest feel like this is the ordinary fact of the room.
Cara asleep on me. Kieran asleep in front of me.
The recipe on the counter at the brownstone in Cara's handwriting, the one Indie made on Monday night from memory.
Mikko's stuffed bear in the blue and gold.
The card in my jacket pocket with the name the nurse wrote down.
Nine months ago I was in a borrowed dress leaning against a hotel door that wasn't latched.
I did not know what any of it was going to be.
I did not know about this room or this man or the small warm weight against my collarbone.
I did not know about Indie's forehead against the baby's forehead, or Lena in the armchair the whole seven hours, or my mother with the tissue at the foot of the bed.
I did not know about any of it.
Now, finally, I close my eyes in the chair at his bedside, and I let myself rest.
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