Chapter Twenty
Her water woke her at four in the morning, breaking all over their sheets and then the bathroom floor.
She ambled back to their bedroom, rocking Landon awake.
“This is it,” she said. Notoriously hard to wake, Landon leaped into action immediately, grabbing their packed hospital bag from the closet and rushing downstairs to make Rose two sandwiches for the car ride, on the off chance labor progressed so quickly she wouldn’t be able to eat once they admitted her.
As instructed, Rose called her gynecologist’s emergency line.
She expected a swift “Okay, it’s go-time!
” What she got was “Sit tight. Bounce on your pregnancy ball, have a cup of tea, and see if contractions start. If they do, come right in. If they don’t, make your way here around nine. ”
So, she bounced. And while she bounced, Landon paced. He wore a timer around his neck like he’d been appointed the baby’s Little League coach from the womb, and popped into the living room to ask her if her abdomen had started tightening every five minutes. But it hadn’t.
Five hours later, it still hadn’t.
Six hours after her water broke, Rose lay in a hospital bed, feeling absolutely fine.
The whole scene surprised her. Wasn’t she supposed to be in the kind of pain they showed in the movies, clinging to the rails of her hospital bed, screaming for an epidural?
Landon sat beside her in a hard chair that he would pull out into a bed when nighttime came, every muscle in his body on alert—though the sitting was a marked improvement from the pacing.
A nurse walked into the room and gave Rose a wan smile. “Nothing’s moving yet?” she asked, the hope clear in her voice.
“Not yet.” It was still early in the day—not even noon—but Rose felt dejected. She’d given the baby so much these last nine months. Why couldn’t the baby give her this?
“You were only about a fingertip dilated on your last check, so the doctor wants to speed things up. Because your water’s already broken, we really want baby out within forty-eight hours.”
“Forty-eight hours?” Landon all but screamed. “How is that even in question?”
The nurse looked at him with rote sympathy. “You took the hospital’s birthing class, right?”
“We did,” Rose said.
“Well, then you know that this is all very normal. Some babies come fast, and some come slow. Baby is just cozy in there.” Rose appreciated the attention to gender-neutrality.
It had been Landon’s idea to wait initially, but it didn’t take her long to come around.
Waiting somehow made it all feel more real, not less.
“We’re going to start you on some drugs to get things moving,” the nurse said. “Cytotec for your cervix, to start. If your body doesn’t start contracting on its own, we may use Pitocin later to help get things going. But we’ll take it slow and give you a chance to respond first.”
“I guess this is why birth plans are so controversial,” Rose said, half amused, half resigned. “Mine’s out the window.”
“Flexibility is the thing,” the nurse said with a smile.
“New plan,” Rose said, bending sideways to grab Landon’s hand. “Don’t die.”
The nurse chuckled. Landon’s grip on her hand loosened. “I’ll be back in a few minutes with your first dose. You just keep eating and drinking, yeah? Honestly, the cafeteria here isn’t all that bad.”
Rose stabbed a fork into the salty chicken pot pie on her tray table. “I’ve been stuffing my face since four in the morning.”
“That’s what I like to hear.”
The moment she was out of sight, Landon stood and shook his arms so hard Rose thought maybe they’d fallen asleep during the short exchange.
“What’s wrong?” she asked. “Don’t tell me you’re already flagging when we’ve still got hours to go.
Or days, maybe? I don’t really want to believe this could go on for forty-eight hours, but at least eventually they’ll give me some of the good drugs. ”
He ran a hand through his thick hair and pulled.
“I don’t want to tell you how to act right now, Rose,” he said.
“I have no business telling you how to do anything right now, but could you please, please not talk about dying? I will be anything you need me to be today, but I can’t fathom—” He choked on the words.
“I just can’t talk about it. Not here. Not when the stakes are so high. ”
“Landon—”
“I am so, so sorry. I promised I wouldn’t put anything on you today, literally anything.”
“Landon,” she said, “take a deep breath, okay? For me?” He did as she instructed, his arms slowly relaxing, shoulders coming down from around his ears. “Great. Now, listen. I am not going to die.”
“See, even you saying that—”
“I will say it this one time, and then we will not talk about it again. I am not dying. We are at one of the best hospitals in the country—hell, in the world. This is going to be a perfect day. We’re going to watch my favorite movies, and order more of this terrible hospital food, and the expertly trained nurses and doctors at this hospital are going to be here every step of the way. ”
“It feels like you’re tempting fate.” He seemed so young in that moment.
So small. And she wondered whether it was his powerlessness that had instilled in him such misplaced fear.
All he could do today was hold her hand and coach her through.
He could not trade bodies with her. They could not swap roles when the going got too hard.
“I’ll stop,” she said. “I told you I wouldn’t say it again, and I won’t.” She patted the bed beside her, satisfied when he finally cracked a smile, then laughed.
“I’m not going to fit there.”
“Just try.” He sunk onto the bed and swung his long legs around until he was supine next to her. “Good,” she said, firing up her laptop. “Now buckle up. It’s time.”
“Are you sure?” He winced, sitting up a little on the pillows.
“Yep,” she said. “This may be the only time in my life I have exactly the right leverage to make you watch this, start to finish.”
He strung an arm around her shoulders and placed one on her protruding stomach, soft and smooth beneath her robe. “I’d say that’s about right,” he said. “Unless this experience makes you want to fill the house with kids.”
“I’m in a pretty good mood, honestly, but do not talk to me about more kids right now.”
“Noted.”
Rose clicked play. “Okay, just so you know, the first twenty minutes are kind of boring. If this were a rewatch, I’d skip them.
The movie’s long enough as it is.” Sepia-toned onlookers waved farewell to passengers and crew as a mournful hymn played through the laptop’s speakers.
The music faded out as submersibles descended into dark, deep water, their bright lights flashing.
“Twenty minutes?” Landon asked, skeptical.
“This is all set in the future,” Rose said, gesturing at the footage of the wreckage, the Titanic’s two pieces still eerily intact on the ocean floor. “You don’t need this part to understand the story, but it helps.”
Landon turned to look at her, and she noticed he’d draped one leg off the edge of the twin hospital bed to give her more room. “You’re amazing, you know,” he said.
“Shhh.” She pointed to the screen. “You’ll miss it.”
An hour into the movie, her contractions started.
They were reassuring, and not intense or regular enough to distract.
Three hours later, a few minutes after the end credits rolled and Rose had wiped most of the tears from her face, they picked up with force.
Landon got his stopwatch out of his backpack. The game was on.
If Rose hadn’t been in so much pain, she would have marveled at the way the room shifted from peaceful soundscape to harsh, white light.
Emergencies have a way of transforming spaces—Rose had certainly watched enough medical dramas to know that.
A room in a hospital was a holding or healing pen until death knocked at the door.
It didn’t matter how light his knuckles.
The doctor’s face at the foot of her bed was strikingly illuminated by the LED lights.
Rose wasn’t sure if it was the drugs talking, or the adrenaline, but she found it beautiful.
“I’m going to need a good push on this next contraction, Rose,” the doctor said, calm despite the tension in the room.
She’d needed a good push on every one of the four contractions that had passed while she’d tried to help baby out of the cozy spot they’d wedged themselves into, jammed in like a crooked puzzle piece, unable to make the straight shot out on their own.
Rose thought she’d been giving good pushes, but maybe she hadn’t—maybe she’d been sending the thought down through the tight muscles on her stomach in a way that hadn’t translated.
Or maybe the epidural hadn’t worn off quite as much as she’d thought.
“You’re doing great,” Landon said. She clenched her teeth and his hand with equal force.
It was blinding. Brutal. The world blurred around her, and she knew there was no equivalent to this pain she would ever experience again.
Her body was bursting at the seams, ripping apart, changing with every push.
Landon stared into her eyes in a way that was both too steady and too serious and made her think it was all exactly as bad as it felt.
The contraction finished, and Rose collapsed.
The monitor to her right beeped. “Baby’s heart rate is up.” The doctor looked at Rose from above her bright blue surgical mask. “We’re going to try forceps. If we can’t get the baby out on the next contraction, we’re prepped for an emergency C-section.”