Chapter 23
Saylor
We’re running.
Not the casual jog of two people who left the house late.
The full-sprint, adrenaline-fueled, dodging-a-man-in-a-wheelchair sprint of two people who have been waiting twelve weeks for a phone call and got it forty-five minutes ago on the Saw Mill River Parkway, while Celeste was driving, which means we’re lucky to be alive and at the hospital instead of in one.
“Elevator!” Celeste shouts, stabbing the button with her index finger. Then again. Then a third time, because Celeste believes that urgency can be communicated to machinery through repetition.
The number above the door doesn’t move.
“Stairs,” I say.
“I’m in heels.”
“Then take them off.”
“These are Valentino.”
“Celeste, your daughter is being born on the fourth floor. Take off the shoes or I will haul you over my shoulder like a sack of taters.”
She kicks them off without breaking stride and we hit the stairwell at a pace that would concern a cardiologist. She takes the steps two at a time, barefoot, one hand on the railing and the other clutching her phone where Raven’s text still glows on the screen: She’s coming. Right now. Bring snacks.
We did not bring snacks. There was no time.
Three flights up, my lungs are burning and Celeste is somehow ahead of me, which I’m going to attribute to sheer maternal willpower rather than any deficiency in my cardio.
She hits the fourth-floor door with both hands and bursts into the labor and delivery ward like she’s the doctor and she needs to save a life.
“Raven Pecker,” she announces to the nurse at the station. “She’s in labor. Where is she?”
The nurse, a sturdy woman in floral scrubs who has clearly weathered decades of frantic almost-parents, doesn’t flinch. She consults her screen with the calm of someone checking a lunch reservation. “What’s your name?”
“Brinley. Celeste Brinley. That’s my baby she’s having. Wait—no, that came out wrong. She’s a surrogate.”
The nurse’s face transforms into several opinions before she checks her screen again. “You’re on the guest list, Ms. Brinley. Drews Pecker is in room three-sixteen A. Down the hall, second left.”
Celeste takes three steps. Four. She realizes I’m not beside her and turns back. “Saylor, come on!”
I’m standing in the middle of the L & D ward with both hands on my chest, shoulders shaking.
“Drews Pecker,” I mutter. “That’s still hilarious.”
“Saylor.”
“What? It’s funny. Do you ever say the full name out loud? Because Drews Pecker is—”
“A perfectly lovely name belonging to the woman who is currently delivering our child. Move. Your. Feet.”
“It’s just—the nurse said it so seriously—”
“Men,” Celeste grumbles, and the word contains the exhaustion of every woman who has ever watched a man find something funny at the worst possible time. “I swear to God.”
She grabs my hand and pulls me down the hall. Room 316A has a closed door and the muffled sounds of controlled chaos behind it. Celeste stops. Smooths her hair. Straightens her blouse. Takes one breath. Then she turns to me.
“This is it.”
I smile. “See you on the other side, Lessi.”
Raven only wants Celeste in the room which was a relief to me. As supportive as I want to be, there are a lot of bodily fluids in that room, and Raven’s a good bro. I think seeing her expel a human being from her body might ruin the friendship.
“I’ll tell her you love her.”
“And I’ll tell her again ten minutes later once she’s bundled and they get the goo off her.”
“Don’t say ‘goo’ when you’re talking about our baby,” Celeste scolds.
She kisses me. Quick, firm, the compressed version of everything she doesn’t have time to say. Then she knocks twice on the door, slips inside, and is gone.
The door closes. The hallway is suddenly very quiet.
I wander down the hall a little aimlessly until a voice reaches me from the waiting area around the corner.
“Saylor.”
Eleanor is seated in a row of chairs near the window. She’s in a navy dress, low heels, a strand of pearls that probably predate my birth. Her posture is perfect, her hands folded in her lap, her expression composed. She looks like she’s waiting for a board meeting, not a baby.
“Eleanor.” I walk over. Sit down in the chair beside her, leaving one empty seat between us…for safety. A snake loves to strike when your back is turned. Celeste has warmed up to Eleanor. I need a little more convincing. “You got banished too?”
“Banished? No.” She adjusts a pearl. “I chose to wait out here. Raven was very generous with the invitation, but I have never been good with…squishy things.”
“Squishy things.”
“Yes, I’ve had a child, remember? I know the mess that’s made in there.” She crosses her ankles. “Thank goodness Celeste is here. She has a stronger stomach than I do.”
I lean forward, elbows on my knees, thumbs twiddling against each other. The nervous energy that was propelling me up four flights of stairs has nowhere to go now. It’s pooling in my hands, my feet, the base of my spine. I bounce my right knee. Stop. Start again.
“Stop fidgeting. You’re making me anxious.”
“I can’t.”
“You can. You simply choose not to.”
“Eleanor, give it a rest. My kid is being born twenty meters from where I’m sitting and I don’t know what to do with my hands. My kid.” I say it like I’m testing the integrity of the word. A baby is one thing. My baby is a whole other thing.
She looks at me. Something moves behind her eyes, something warmer than I’ve seen from her before. Not soft, exactly. Eleanor doesn’t do soft. But the hardness rearranges into something adjacent to tenderness, the way a winter sky can look almost gentle just before dawn.
“You’re going to be a good father, Saylor.
” She says it with certainty, as if the matter has already been settled and she’s merely informing me of the outcome.
“Don’t worry too much. Children are resilient.
They forgive the mistakes you make as long as you show up for the moments that matter.
” She pauses. “This is one of those moments. You’re here. That’s enough.”
I look at her. This woman who fought us for months, who deployed lawyers and legal strategies and every weapon in her arsenal to claim this baby.
This woman who then stood at her daughter’s grave and chose to let go.
Who sold two properties and wrote a check and surrendered her rights because she finally heard what her daughter was saying.
“Thank you, Eleanor.”
“For what?”
“For being here. For all of it.”
She nods but doesn’t elaborate. Eleanor does not require gratitude to be expanded upon. She accepts it the way she accepts a coat check ticket: efficiently, without sentiment, and with the expectation that the interaction is now complete.
We sit in silence. The hospital hums around us.
Nurses pass in soft-soled shoes. A phone rings somewhere down the hall.
The clock on the wall ticks through minutes that feel like geological eras.
Eleanor reads a magazine she brought from home.
I stare at the floor tiles and count them because my brain needs a task or it’s going to implode.
Thirty-seven tiles between my chair and the nurses’ station. I count them twice. The number doesn’t change, but the exercise keeps my hands from shaking.
Then, finally, after two trips down to the cafeteria, three loo breaks, and failing to finish two different Sudokus, the door opens.
A nurse steps into the hallway. Young, smiling, tired in the good way. She looks at me, then at Eleanor, and the smile widens.
“Family for Drews Pecker?”
I don’t laugh this time. I’m too far past laughter. I’m in the territory beyond it, where everything is sharp and bright and the air tastes different.
“Baby girl is here,” the nurse says. “Healthy. Strong lungs. Mom and mom and baby are ready for you.”
When I stand, my legs feel borrowed. Eleanor rises beside me with considerably more grace, smoothing her dress, touching her pearls, preparing to meet her granddaughter the way she prepares for everything: with composure and an unshakable belief that presentation matters even when the world is falling apart. Or coming together.
The walk to 316A takes ten seconds and ten years.
I push open the door.
Celeste is in the chair beside the bed, and she’s holding a baby.
The room is quiet now. The chaos of delivery has settled into the particular hush that follows arrival, the reverent silence of a space that just witnessed something impossible become ordinary.
Raven is propped up in the bed, sweaty and wrecked and grinning with the satisfied exhaustion of an athlete who just finished a race she trained nine months for.
Medical equipment beeps softly. The afternoon light comes through the window and lands on the bundle in Celeste’s arms, and the bundle has hair.
Red hair. A full head of it. Bright copper, curling already at the temples, catching the light the way only that specific shade of red can. Whitney’s hair. Whitney’s daughter.
Celeste looks up at me. Her eyes are wet and her face is open and there is nothing guarded, nothing designed, nothing held back. She is, in this moment, the most undefended version of herself I have ever seen.
“Come here,” she says.
I cross the room. Celeste stands, careful, slow, cradling the baby against her chest with natural confidence, like she’s been rehearsing this hold in her imagination for months.
She transfers the baby into my arms and the weight is nothing.
Six pounds, maybe seven. A whole person who weighs less than the puppy did at eight weeks but carries the gravity of everything we’ve built and lost and rebuilt to get here.
“Meet our daughter,” Celeste says.
Our daughter.