LAWSON
Eleven months later…
I’ve been shot at. I’ve carried men off ridgelines under fire. I once field-dressed my own leg with a flashlight in my teeth.
None of it prepared me for my wife going into labor at two in the morning.
We’d stopped being careful back in the fall. Her call — announced over pancakes with her chin up like a dare — and I’d had her back in bed before our breakfast got cold. Nine months later, the dare was winning.
“Lawson.”
I was awake before the second syllable. Her hand had clamped on my forearm and her voice was very careful.
“Don’t panic,” she said, “but I believe the eviction has begun.”
I panicked.
I was on my feet searching for my pants, everything going blank inside me. We’d practiced this moment because I didn’t want her to panic. No I was the one searching for my phone. The keys.
“Babe.” Amy was sitting up on the side of the bed, hugely, gloriously pregnant, watching me with the expression she saved for her wildlife documentaries.
“Contractions. How far apart.”
“Ten minutes, ish. First baby. We have hours. The doctor said when they hit five—”
“We’re leaving.”
“Lawson.”
“Now.”
“At least let me put on pants.”
“No time.” I walked to her, intending to pick her up and carry her to the truck.
She pushed back. “I refuse to do the hospital naked, Lawson. Pants and shirt now.”
Like any good solider, I did what I was ordered to do.
I grabbed one of my t-shirts and literally stuffed her into it, as she protested.
Next, I pulled out a pair of my shorts and placed her feet inside before pulling her upright and pulling them up over her hips.
There was no drawstring in this pair. She didn’t needed it.
Hadn’t needed it for months. Her expanded belly fit perfectly inside them.
Just like my baby fit perfectly inside her.
I spread my hand over her stomach and waited. Every time I did this, our baby responded. One hard, short jab.
“Stop that,” she said, smacking my hand away. “I’m in enough pain as it is.”
“Of course you are. Let’s get you to the hospital.” I picked her up and carried her to the truck. She didn’t protest for once.
The forty-minute drive took thirty-one. And she talked the entire way down the mountain.
She talked through the contractions that whited her knuckles on the door handle.
She narrated my driving, and the moon, and the name debate we still hadn’t settled.
Ten mintues in and her voice climbed a register and the jokes started coming faster, stacking on each other, no air between them.
“—and if it’s a boy we are not naming him after a mountain, I know you, you’ll do it, I’ll wake up and the birth certificate will say Ridgeline.”
Another deep breath, another contraction. “Lawson, did you know Bigfoot sightings are down this year? It’s because I’ve domesticated one, of course. Oh, that’s a big one, that’s — ha — that’s fine, everything’s fine, it’s fine—”
“Amy.”
“—because —”
“Amy.” I took the hand that didn’t have the door handle in a death grip and folded it into mine, all the way, and held it on my knee, and kept my eyes on the road and my voice level because one of us had to be bedrock. And I was her bedrock.
“Most people get quiet when they’re scared,” I said. “Not you. You get loud.” I brought her knuckles up and pressed my mouth to them. “I know exactly how scared you are right now. You don’t have to outtalk it. I’m right here. I’ve got the whole weight of you.”
The cab went quiet. Only the engine, and the tires. Then she pressed my hand against her cheek.
“I’m really scared, Lawson.”
“I know, baby.”
“What if I’m not — I’ve never done a brave thing this big.”
“You’ve been doing it for nine months.” The hospital lights came up over the last rise and I let the tense ease just a little from my shoulders. “And you won’t do one second of it alone. Who’s got you?”
A wet laugh. “You do.”
Juniper Rae came into the world at almost ten o’clock the next morning, red-faced and furious about it, with a full head of dark hair and a set of lungs that made the dLawsonvery nurse take a physical step back.
“Well,” Amy said, looking exhausted but radiant, our daughter finally settling down long enough to nurse. “She’s loud.”
“Wonder where she gets it.”
“From her father. Obviously. He never shuts up.” She looked up at me, and I looked at the two of them and realized this was it. The thing I’d been searching for my whole life. Not the mountain. Not the quiet. Them.
Amy reached up and caught a tear off my jaw with her thumb.
“Look at that,” she whispered, grinning through her own. “Drenched for me this time, mountain man.”
Yeah, I totally was.