Chapter 39 Steven
Chapter thirty-nine
Steven
“I can’t do it!”
Emma’s words nearly vanish between her groans and pursing breaths.
The fluorescent lights glare down on her flushed face.
Damp strands of brown hair are plastered to her forehead and neck.
I’ve tried tying it back three times, but it keeps slipping free.
I try again as she curls herself around her knees.
“Another one is coming…three…two…”
“No,” Emma cries just as the doctor says, “Push, Emma!”
“Come on, baby, you can do this,” I whisper, holding her up as she lets out a guttural sound that comes from deep in her chest. She pushes hard, giving it everything she has.
“I see the head!” a nurse shouts. “Keep pushing!”
“You hear that, Em? A head.” I want to look, but I stay locked on her. Thirteen hours. She’s been at this for thirteen hours.
Emma groans again, her heart rate spiking across the monitor, her breaths doubling as they stack on top of each other. Her arms shake under the strain as she holds her knees up. She bears down, trembling, and pushes again.
“Shoulders,” the doctor announces, and out of the corner of my eye, I catch the blur of tiny arms flailing. Emma screams as one final push delivers the baby into the doctor’s gloved hands.
A newborn cry, sharp and alive, erupts through the room. Emma collapses back onto the bed—panting, exhausted, radiant—as she watches them hold up our baby.
“Steven,” the doctor summons me with an encouraging smile. “I’ll let you do the honors.”
She keeps the baby covered below the waist, encouraging me to assess. Emma smiles as hard as her worn body can manage. Tears are already pulling at the corners of my eyes, but the moment the doctor moves the towel, a sob rips out of me.
“It’s a girl,” I choke. “Emma, it’s a girl!”
They quickly lay our daughter on Emma’s chest, and she breaks into joyful, shaky sobs, clinging to the dream we thought would never come.
“Hi, baby girl.” Emma shudders, like her body can’t decide whether to laugh or cry, so it does both. She gazes down at her, mesmerized by her black curls and glowing amber skin.
“That’s our girl,” I whisper, leaning down to take a better look. She has adorably round cheeks, a button nose, and eyes as green and striking as her mother’s. “She’s beautiful.”
“She’s perfect.”
“You both are.”
I kiss Emma’s head, the euphoria she’s certainly feeling so overwhelming it floods over me. This is absolute bliss.
A knock comes once. Then twice. Then harder, like someone’s trying to break down the door.
My eyes snap open.
The fluorescent hospital lights are gone. I’m back in the darkness of my childhood bedroom, the blades of the ceiling fan cutting through the silence.
“Steven, come on. The cows wait for no one,” Dad calls from the hallway.
My watch reads just past 6 a.m. Still in my boxers, I jump out of bed and tear down the hall. Dad’s already downstairs when I barrel past him into the kitchen and dive for the stack of photo albums.
“Whoa, what’s the rush?” Dad asks, zipping up his coat. “And where are your pants?”
“One second,” I mutter, flipping frantically through the pages. I find the one I want and shove the rest aside. “Here—here it is!” I’m vibrating with excitement as I thrust the photo between Dad’s face and mine. Back and forth, back and forth.
“What am I—”
“I remembered!” I shout. “I remembered!”
Dad’s eyes search mine cautiously then the photo. But when he realizes, they go misty, and his face lights up as he pulls me into a hug. “Tell me everything.”
I pace the room, still in my underwear, spilling every detail.
The lights. The way the room smelled like a mix of iron and disinfectant.
How my legs were freezing, but my arms burned from holding Emma up.
How she looked…strong but exhausted, resilient, anxious.
How squishy and beautiful and perfect Josie was.
How the photo of Emma holding the baby looks exactly like what I remember in my head.
“She was born at 5:22 in the morning,” I say, slumping into a chair.
Dad sits across from me, glowing. “It’s like you’re telling me all over again.”
I sigh, elated, rubbing my sternum as warmth and a lightness I haven’t felt since the accident washes over me.
“Ah!” Shayna suddenly appears, shrieking. “Where are your pants?” She shields her eyes as she hurries past me and into the kitchen.
“Calm down,” I groan, too happy and weightless for her dramatics to faze me.
“So, what are you going to do?” Dad asks, pushing himself up and heading for the back door.
“I guess keep working on the rest of the memories?” I stand.
“If that’s what you think is best.” He gestures to the coveralls hanging by the door. “Why don’t you do it while you feed the herd, huh?”
The pride and elation from the dream carry me swiftly through the morning chores. I don’t even flinch when I step in manure, or when the hay bales are heavier than usual, or when I nearly trip heading back to the house.
Inside, Mom and my sisters sit around the table with coffee and muffins, the newspaper, and a photo album open between them.
“Remember this?” Tamara giggles.
“Oh my gosh,” Jay gasps.
“You both hated those outfits,” Mom adds. Her eyes are warm and focused, here. She’s here today. My joy swells, thinking of all the things I want to tell her while she is.
I sit with them as they flip pages, waiting for my chance, but Jay takes this opportunity to tell Mom about my accident first, to which Mom responds with horror.
I reassure her over and over that I’m okay, I’m safe, but all morning, she reaches out to touch my hand or my arm, checking that I’m real.
Then she goes back to smiling and laughing like she used to, and I find myself doing the same, touching her just to make sure this isn’t a dream.
“So, what are you going to do?” Mom asks once we’re alone, playing checkers, after I filled her in.
“I’m not sure,” I say, jumping two of her pieces.
She tsks me and the pile of her captured pieces I’m hoarding. “How dare you treat your mother that way.”
I laugh as she then jumps two of mine. “I told Dad I’m going to keep working on my memories. Maybe start from the beginning. Maybe hold all of your photos hostage.”
“Doesn’t Emma have albums?”
Fair question. Why wouldn’t I want to do all this at home?
“She does. But you have copies, so…I’ve got everything I need here.”
“Do you, though?” she poses.
“Yeah.” I shrug, taking another piece off the board. “Plus, this way I get to spend time with you.” She makes a hmm sound in response.
“And I feel like I’m just in the way at home right now,” I add. “I’m giving them space.”
“Well, that’s stupid.”
“Mom,” I scoff out a laugh.
She shrugs at this, the way she always did growing up when she was blunt. My mother has never been an abrasive person. Just honest. Painfully, relentlessly honest. Never watching her words if it meant withholding information. I always admired that. But now, not so much.
“I’m just saying,” she says, “you’ve lost your memory, not your marriage. Why hide here? Why not go back and fight for it?”
“I’m not hiding here,” I argue, but she rolls her eyes.
“The son I raised would be racing back to his wife. He’d fight for his memories, his marriage, the life he built.”
A sharp laugh shoots out of me. “That’s dramatic. I’m just giving them some space. It’s all a lot. And you need me here.”
“Am I on my deathbed?” she deadpans.
“Well, clearly not.”
“Then you don’t need to be here.”
“Ugh.” I mock a stabbing motion into my chest. “Right where it hurts.”
“And I’m not being dramatic, son.”
She abandons the checkers as she pushes her reading glasses to the top of her head, her white curls now sticking up all around them. “I’m being honest. And what you’re doing is wrong. You shouldn’t be here, chumming it up with your sick mother.”
“Mom.” I gape. “You’re not—”
“Oh, please. I’m not stupid. I know something’s wrong.
You don’t think I figured it out when I started waking up to a note with the date and your father’s phone number on my nightstand?
Or I don’t see it when your sisters trail me to the bathroom like a litter of kittens?
I know I’m losing my mind, Steven. But don’t let me lose my dignity too.
Speak to me like the mother you know. The woman who can take it. ”
I press my lips into a line, weighing my words. But her gray eyes stay pinned on me, steady and expectant. She knows I’ll do what she says.
“Alright,” I say quietly, gesturing for her to go on.
She steeples her hands under her chin, studying me so intently it feels like she can see straight down to my bones.
“You need to go home, Steven,” she finally says. “Be with your wife, your kids.”
I open my mouth to argue, ready to give some poor excuse about space or timing or how this is what works for us, as if I really know that. But Mom lifts a hand, silencing me before I let my arrogance win.
“Listen to me.” Her tone softens and she lowers her hand.
“We don’t have as much time as we think we do.
These moments, these memories…they are fleeting.
They come and go. Some might never return.
” She laughs at herself, at the sheer reality that some of hers are gone forever.
“But the moments we have right now? The ones right in front of us? I could wallow away every day because I don’t remember your father’s favorite color, or the day we met, or I could soak up the moments now when he wears blue or when he smiles at the sun.
These moments are happening now, and they don’t wait for anyone.
Not for convenience or fear. Not for a man hiding at his parents’ house because he’s afraid of what he might find in his own home. ”
“That’s not—” I start.
“It is.” She nods. “You don’t think I understand? What if everything comes back to me, and I remember all the hard things, all the sad things? All the things that make me someone I don’t want to be?”
Her words are fragile, breakable, as she speaks, but she lifts her chin and keeps going.
“I don’t know what will happen tomorrow, what I’ll remember, or what I won’t. But you could. You will. And you can do that with the girl you are madly in love with by your side.”
I swallow hard. I blink hard, like that might ease the pressure building behind my eyes.
She leans forward, resting her frail, weathered hands atop mine. “Go home to your wife. Soak up every moment you still can. Fight like I know you can. And fight because Emma needs a man to fight for her.”
Heat stings behind my eyes. I scrub a hand over my face and pinch the bridge of my nose. “Mom…”
“You love that girl, Steven.” Her mouth lifts into the smallest smile, and her eyes shine. “Memory or not, I see it every time you say her name. So go home. Don’t wait until you feel ready, either. Just go get your wife.”