Chapter Sixteen
They moved fast, once they moved.
“We’re not waiting for a full crash,” Dr. Anand said, already gowning up. “His heart rate’s telling us he’s tired. We’re not going to argue with him. C-section, now, while everyone’s calm.”
“Calm” was a generous word for the room. Someone was already cutting my gown. Someone else was explaining a spinal block in a voice too fast to properly follow. Callum was being walked out by a nurse, protesting, and Jess was being handed scrubs.
?
“I need you,” I said to her, gripping her wrist. “Not him. You.”
“I’m not going anywhere,” Jess said, and for the first time since 4:50 that morning, her paramedic calm cracked, just slightly, just for me. “I’ve got you. I’ve got you both.”
?
I felt the spinal block go in like cold water down my spine. Within minutes, the world below my ribs became a strange, pressureless nothing.
“You’ll feel tugging,” someone said. “No pain. Just tugging.”
?
I stared at the ceiling. Another water stain, a different shape than the one three floors up, though I didn’t know that yet.
I thought about Elias somewhere above me, cut open for a woman he’d once loved, while I was being cut open for a son neither of us had chosen to bring into the world this way, on this morning, at the same time.
Two operating rooms. One building. Two people who loved each other, unconscious to each other’s crisis, both bleeding for someone.
I laughed. It came out wrong, half a sob.
“What’s funny?” Jess asked, gripping my hand.
“Nothing,” I said. “Everything. Ask me later.”
?
At 8:34 a.m., I felt the tugging Dr. Anand had promised.
At 8:36, I heard a sound I will hear for the rest of my life: a small, furious, indignant cry, the sound of someone arriving somewhere he hadn’t asked to go and objecting to it immediately.
“He’s here,” Dr. Anand said. “He’s here, and he is loud, and I love that for you.”
?
“Is he okay?” I couldn’t see over the drape. “Is he all right?”
“Nine pounds even, and telling us exactly what he thinks of the whole morning,” a nurse said, and then he was there, red and furious and impossibly, entirely real, laid against my chest with my arms too weak from the spinal to properly hold him, so Jess held my arms up for me.
?
“Theodore,” I said, into the top of his head, which smelled like nothing I had ever smelled before and everything I would ever want to smell again. “Theo.”
Elias and I had never agreed on the name. We’d had a list of six, argued gently about all of them for a month.
I chose it myself, in that moment, alone. It felt right that I did.
?
Jess was crying. Callum, readmitted to the room now that the danger had passed, was crying so hard he had to leave again to compose himself in the hallway, which made everyone laugh, including me, including, I think, one of the nurses.
I looked at the clock on the wall. 8:52 a.m.
“Someone needs to tell his father,” I said. “The second he’s awake. The very second.”
?
Nobody said anything for a moment.
“He’s still in surgery,” Jess said gently. “Wren. He’s not out yet.”
I looked down at Theo, red-faced and outraged and perfect, and understood that somewhere above me, my husband didn’t yet know his son had a name, a weight, a voice.
He didn’t know any of it.
And upstairs, neither did Mara, not yet, not for another two hours.