49. Declan
DECLAN
Avery’s hand closes around mine hard enough to grind my knuckles together, and every plan I wrote disappears beneath one fact: she asked for me. Not June. Not Dr. Evans. Not the club men waiting for a reason to turn one woman’s labor into a guarded convoy. Me.
“The bag first,” she says, releasing me when the contraction lets her stand on her own weight.
Her hair has come loose from the knot she wore to bed, and the old shirt covering her stomach rides above one bare knee.
I have never seen anything more frightening or more wanted in my life.
“Then my shoes. The black ones by the bathroom, not the sandals. If you start running around like the house is on fire, I’m making June drive me. ”
“Bag. Black shoes. No running.” I repeat the order from inside the door she pulled me through, the white-capped key still hanging from the hand she took. “The hospital number’s in my notebook.”
“Bring my phone. I’ll call while I change.
” Avery takes two steps toward the bathroom, stops, and puts both hands against the dresser when another contraction catches her.
I nearly close the distance to lift her and carry her out before pain gets another chance to touch her.
That instinct used to make me proud. It got men onto her fence after she told me to leave her alone.
I wait where she can see me. “Lower back. Press here.”
I move only after she points, setting the heel of my hand against the place she showed me.
Avery leans into the pressure and breathes through her teeth while the seconds go by uncounted.
The notebook says contractions have a beginning, a peak, and an end, and she doesn’t need me to count; she needs me to press where she showed me.
When the tension leaves her body, I take my hand back before she has to ask.
“That helped,” she says, breathing hard as she looks over her shoulder. “Do it again when I tell you.”
“I’ll do it again when you ask.” I hold her gaze until she nods, then move away instead of hovering close enough to put my worry under her care too.
The hospital bag is beside the office door where Avery left it.
Her phone rests on the nightstand beside the signed birth plan.
I collect both, find the shoes, and carry the bag back with every zipper as she left it and the papers she watched me place in the front pocket still inside it.
The old version of me would have opened all of them and called it preparation.
This morning I put the bag by the bedroom door and hand Avery her phone.
She calls the number Dr. Evans gave her, answers questions between contractions, and gives the nurse the pattern she tracked before waking me.
I hear the nurse tell her to come in. Avery says her water hasn’t broken, the baby is moving, and there’s no bleeding.
She ends the call, then looks at the clothes she laid across the bed last night as if getting dressed has become an insult personally arranged by pregnancy.
“The green dress or the black pants?” she asks, nudging both hangers with two fingers. I’ve dressed men with gunshot wounds more easily than I can offer one pregnant woman an opinion without making it sound like an order.
“The dress will be easier at the hospital.” I stop before certainty can turn an opinion into an order. “I can help with it.”
“Not from you. Turn around and tell me if June answered.”
I face the hall and send June the message Avery dictated: labor has started, we’re going to the hospital, wait for instructions before coming.
June answers with six exclamation points, a promise to bring the freezer meals Avery told her not to touch, and one line of instruction for me in capital letters that uses the word testicles.
“She answered,” I say. “She’s bringing the casseroles, and she has plans for me if anybody lets you eat hospital eggs.”
Fabric moves behind me. “Good. At least one person is prepared.”
The insult lands inside the same familiar rhythm that once let us fight about burnt toast while sharing a kitchen.
I let it land and keep my mouth shut. Avery has prepared for this child through every month I made harder.
I’m here because she put my name on the page.
Carrying one bag does not repay any month she carried alone.
“I’m dressed,” she says, and the strain beneath her impatience makes me turn before she has to call twice. “You can look.”
The green cotton dress from our first dinner as a reconciled couple hangs around her legs, and she catches me remembering before I can hide it. She rolls her eyes, but the expression breaks when pain folds her toward the bed.
“Back,” she orders, reaching for me before pride can make her wait. I set down the bag and move behind her, grateful for a task that has her exact permission attached to it.
I press where she showed me. Avery grips my forearm until the contraction passes, then leaves her hand there while she looks toward the hall. “We’re taking my car. The inspected seat is in mine, and I want it at the hospital when we leave.”
“Your car.” I lift the bag and hold my free arm out where she can take it or leave it.
“I’m pregnant, Declan. I haven’t lost my legs.” She gets through the bedroom door before stopping again, one hand reaching toward the wall when the floor seems to move beneath her. “But you may put my shoes on while I stand here and hate you.”
I kneel, slide one shoe onto each foot, and fasten the straps with my hands at her ankles and nowhere else.
Avery keeps one hand on my shoulder for balance.
The weight of it hurts more than her nails did earlier.
She used to put a hand on me the way a person puts a hand on a wall.
This morning every allowed contact is spoken, and I’d rather spend the rest of my life waiting for her words than become the man who makes her regret reaching for me again.
The drive would take fifteen minutes on an empty road.
Dawn traffic turns every light red, and Avery keeps one hand around the door handle while the other presses beneath her stomach.
I drive her car below the speed limit for the first time since she has known me, use the route we rehearsed, and keep my phone in the console where she can see it.
“Talk,” she says when the hospital sign appears beyond a line of brake lights.
“About what?” I watch the line of cars instead of searching her face, though I want a subject capable of making her forget where we’re going for even one minute.
“Anything that isn’t my cervix, the traffic, or whether I packed enough socks.” Her eyes close as another contraction builds. “Tell me something about your mother I don’t know.”
There should be nothing left. Avery read my mother’s hospice letter when I couldn’t.
She made soup my mother complained about and drove her to appointments after I used work as an excuse to stay away from rooms where somebody might tell me the truth.
Yet I kept pieces for myself, small ugly things I protected long after there was nobody left to punish by sharing them.
“She stole a pie from a church supper when I was eleven,” I say.
Avery opens one eye and studies me as if pain hasn’t removed her ability to catch a lie. “Your mother made pie.”
“Not that day. She brought grocery-store cookies, saw the lemon pie Mrs. Daugherty put on the prize table, and carried it out beneath her coat.” I turn into the hospital entrance as Avery begins breathing through another contraction. “She blamed me when the tin slid out in the parking lot.”
“Did you help her steal it?” Avery asks, and the fact that she wants the answer while pain keeps dragging her attention away makes me search for every part of the memory I buried.
“I held the door.” The confession makes Avery’s mouth move despite the contraction, and I remember standing beneath a church awning with my mother’s stolen dessert pressed against my side.
“Then you were guilty.” Avery’s hand reaches across the console. I give her mine and let her set the grip. “Keep talking.”
I tell her how my mother cut the pie with a pocketknife at the kitchen table and made me return the clean tin before Sunday service.
I tell her Mrs. Daugherty knew exactly who took it and gave my mother another one the week she started treatment.
I had never told Avery that part. The kindness embarrassed my mother, so we treated it like another crime.
“She cried in the truck,” I say as I pull into the labor entrance. “Then she made me promise I’d tell Mrs. Daugherty the first pie was better.”
Avery laughs once before the pain takes the sound. “That was mean.”
“It was true.” I park where the sign directs, leave the bag inside, and move to her door. “There’s a chair inside the entrance if you want one.”
“Help me out. Then get the bag. In that order.”
Inside, the woman at the desk asks who I am while a nurse brings a chair Avery refuses until the next contraction makes standing stupid.
My old answer comes first. Husband. Protector.
The man responsible for both of them. None of those words belong to me just because we came through the doors together.
“He’s my partner, the baby’s father, and the person on my birth plan,” Avery says before I answer. She takes the chair, catches my shirt, and pulls me beside it. “He stays unless I say otherwise.”
The nurse looks at Avery, not me, marks something on the page clipped to the chair, and turns toward the secured doors. “All right. I’ll take you both back.”