12. Margot
Margot
My phone rings a bunch of times between my mother's driveway and the hospital parking garage.
I count because there's nothing else to do with my hands. It's on my lap face down and it buzzes against my thigh and I let it. Somewhere around the seventh call I turn it face up to make sure it's him and not the OB, and it's him, and I turn it back over.
"He's coming," my mother says at a red light. "For what it's worth."
"He was coming after they did the cake."
She doesn't say anything else.
Labor and delivery is on the fourth floor, mom pushes me in a wheelchair. The elevator takes forever. I have a contraction in it, leaning on the rail with my forehead against the cool steel, and a man with flowers gets on at two and gets right back off.
They put me in a room with a window that looks at a parking structure. A nurse named Bettina with purple scrubs and hands like a pianist checks me and says, "Oh, honey, you're at six," and looks at my mother, and my mother says, "It's just us," and Bettina says, "That's plenty."
There's paperwork. There's always paperwork. Bettina has my pre-registration on a tablet and she scrolls through it between contractions, confirming things, and she gets to a line and stops.
"Support person. Anders Stenburg. Is he on his way?"
I look at the ceiling.
"Put my mother."
Bettina doesn't blink. She taps. "Diane Reyes. Got it." And then, gently, "We can add him later if he shows up. Doesn't cost anything."
"He's not going to show up."
"Okay."
"He's at a birthday party."
Bettina's hands go still for one second on the tablet. Then she sets it down and puts one of them on my knee and says, "Then let's get this girl out while it's just us ladies," and the next contraction comes, and I don't think about the line on the form again for a long time.
It goes fast.
The class said first babies take a while. The OB said twelve hours, maybe more. I'd planned for twelve hours. I'd even packed a paperback novel in my hospital bag to help me kill time.
First check had me at six centimeters dilated.
At one-fifteen I'm at eight and I'm not thinking about the book anymore.
I'm not thinking about anything. There's just the inside of my body and the sound my mother makes when she breathes with me and Bettina's hand on my back.
The contractions have stopped being separate things and become a tide, one under the next, and somewhere in it I've stopped being a person who runs a real estate company and started being a person who's held to the earth by pain.
Around two the monitor changes tone.
I don't know what the tones mean. I know that Bettina looks up at it and her face doesn't change but her hands do. She reaches over and adjusts something on my belly and looks at the screen again and says, "Let's get you on your left side, honey."
I go on my left side.
The tone doesn't change back.
Bettina presses a button on the wall. Not urgently.
Just presses it, the way you'd ring a bell.
And then there are two more people in the room, and then four, and someone puts an oxygen mask over my face and the plastic smells like a swimming pool, and a doctor I've never seen is between my knees saying something to Bettina in a low, fast voice that I'm not supposed to hear.
"What's happening?" I say into the mask.
"Baby's heart rate dipped a little," Bettina says. "We're just keeping an eye on her. Nice big breaths for me."
A little. I know what a little sounds like when someone's saying it to keep you calm. I do it to city councils.
I'm terrified.
I've never been this scared in my life. Not the day my father died. Not the night I sat on a porch and waited for Anders to tell me what he'd done. It's a cold, huge fear, bigger than the room, and it's got my daughter in it.
"I want Anders," I say.
I don't decide it consciously. It comes out of my mouth into the mask, and I hear it, and I hate myself so fast and so completely that for a second it's louder than the fear.
My mother's hand is in mine. She hasn't let go of it since the parking garage. She doesn't say anything about what I just said. She just squeezes, hard, and puts her other hand on my forehead, and says, "I'm here. I'm right here. Look at me."
I look at her.
"You're going to push when they say, and you're going to give me my granddaughter. That's all you have to do. You hear me?"
"Yes."
"Then do it."
The rest is a blur of voices and my mother's face and the ceiling tile with the water stain shaped like Ohio.
Then, at 4:17 in the afternoon, a sound.
A thin furious wail, like something very small and very offended at being dragged into this world.
They put her on my chest. She's slick and purple and hot and she has a full head of black hair plastered to her skull and her mouth is open and her fists are up, both of them, like she's come out swinging.
"Hi," I say. "Hi, Nora. Hi, baby.”
She's perfect. Absolutely perfect.
I cry so hard I can't see her. My mother is crying.
Bettina is doing something at my feet and saying "good, good, that's good" to someone, and the monitor has gone back to whatever tone it's supposed to make.
My daughter is on my chest breathing against my skin, and nothing else in the world has ever mattered as much as this moment.
Nora Diane Reyes-Stenburg. Seven pounds, one ounce.
My mother takes the first photograph. She stands at the end of the bed with her phone shaking and takes it, and I know without looking that it's terrible, and I know I'll keep it forever.
They leave us alone for a while. Nora is asleep on my chest with her fist in her mouth. My mother has gone to the hallway to call my aunt and cry where I can't see.
My phone, which has been in my mother's purse for five hours, is on the tray table. She's put it there without comment.
It lights up.
Not him. Vanessa. A screenshot.
I know I shouldn't. I know that with my daughter asleep on my chest an hour old, I should put it face down. I don't. I'm apparently a person who does that now.
It's Becca's post. Timestamped 3:52 p.m.
The pavilion. Sun through the trees. A white cake with a fondant excavator on it, yellow, with a little number one on the scoop.
Milo's in the middle in a paper crown. Becca's on his left with her face against his cheek. Anders is on his right, crouched, one arm around both of them, laughing.
He's wearing the gray shirt.
The caption says The best day. My boys. And a heart, and a cake, and a heart.
Three fifty-two. Nearly two hours after his daughter's heart rate dropped and a doctor he'd never met came between my knees. Twenty-five minutes before she was born, while I was still looking at the door.
I look at the photograph.
I look at Nora. Her eyelashes. Her ear, which is folded a little at the top. Her fist.
Then the photograph.
Whatever was still lit in me, some pilot light I hadn't known was on, goes out. No sound. No smoke. Just a small blue flame that isn't there anymore.
I put the phone face down. I put both hands on my daughter.
"It's just us," I tell her. "That's plenty."