Chapter 24
Chapter
Twenty-Four
Natasha
Nine months in, I am enormous and I have opinions about this that I share with anyone who makes the tactical error of commenting on it first.
Nik has learned, through a single memorable incident involving an unsolicited observation about my center of gravity and three days of what he diplomatically called a frosty operational climate, to wait until I raise the subject myself.
He now navigates this with the careful, studied neutrality of a man defusing something that has a hair trigger and excellent aim.
This morning's budget presentation is on slide eleven of nineteen when my body files its notice of resignation. A contraction.
The sensation is not what I expected - considerably less cinematic and considerably more inconvenient than anything I had researched across the seventeen pregnancy reference books I have not admitted to owning.
I finish the sentence I am on. I hit save on the document with the automatic reflex of a woman who lost one quarterly report to a power outage in 2019 and has never fully recovered her equanimity about it. Then I look at Brandy across the conference table.
"I need to leave," I say. "Take notes."
Brandy looks at me. Then at the conference table. Then back at me. "You just — Natasha, did your —"
"Notes, Brandy."
"Yes." He puffs out a breath. "Yes. Notes. Got it. Go."
The drive to Northwestern Memorial is eleven minutes at this hour.
I spend eight of them on the phone with Dr. Markov, two of them texting Victoria the single word happening, which she will understand completely, and approximately forty-five seconds realizing that I have not told Nik.
I correct this oversight while the cab stops at a light on Michigan Avenue. His phone rings once.
"I'm already in the car," he says, before I have finished saying his name.
"How are you already in the car?"
"Brandy called me," he says. "Twenty seconds after your cab pulled away. He said you looked like a woman with a mission and no luggage and he thought I should know." A pause. "I have been carrying your hospital bag in my trunk for three weeks."
"You have been carrying my hospital bag in your trunk for three weeks," I repeat.
"You scheduled the due date in my calendar in red," he says. "Red is your emergency color. I took appropriate precautions."
I look out the cab window at Chicago doing its indifferent midmorning operation. Something large and warm moves through me that has nothing to do with the contractions, which are, for the record, already doing their own large and not remotely warm thing.
"Drive faster," I say, to the cab driver and also, in spirit, to everyone.
Labor is long.
This is the clinical term for something that deserves considerably more expressive vocabulary.
Long, and frightening in the way of things that are happening to your body at a scale and intensity your brain cannot fully ratify.
Somewhere around the sixth hour my English becomes insufficient for what is being asked of it and I stop using it.
The Russian arrives without announcement. The language of my father's Pushkin at the dinner table and my mother's Chopin under her breath and every true thing I have said in the dark for seven months with a man who answers in the same tongue.
I do not decide to switch. My body simply determines that English is a language for spreadsheets and board meetings and that this, categorically, is neither.
I say several things in Russian during those hours that I will not be transcribing. Dr. Markov, who is Russian-American and therefore comprehensively bilingual, has the professional composure to keep her expression clinical. Nik holds my hand through every contraction.
"You're doing incredibly well," he says, in Russian, against my hair.
"That is a lie," I say, in Russian, "and we both know it but I appreciate it enormously."
He laughs. Low and genuine, surprised out of him, and the sound of it moves through the fear in my chest and makes a small, navigable clearing.
He keeps talking to me in the language of our childhoods - the one we both stopped using because it held too much. His mother's kitchen. My father's Pushkin. The apartment in Brooklyn and the rink on Tuesday mornings.
It turns out that is precisely why it helps. Because it is the language of the people we were before we decided that those people needed to be sealed away, and right now, in this room, sealed away is not an available option.
She arrives at four-seventeen in the afternoon with a cry that is less a sound and more an announcement - the full-throated, indignant declaration of a person who has decided to exist and wants the room to acknowledge this immediately.
Six pounds, four ounces. Dark hair. Dark eyes that are not yet focused but are already, somehow, looking.
Dr. Markov places her in Nik's arms first, because my hands are shaking in the comprehensive way of a woman whose body has just completed an extraordinary and extremely demanding project and needs approximately thirty seconds to remember how hands work.
I asked him, weeks ago, sitting at my kitchen island at eleven PM with the pregnancy reference books I do not own spread across the counter, if he would hold her first. He said yes without asking why, which was the correct response, because the why was simply that I wanted to watch his face, and I did not want to admit to that directly.
I watch his face.
All the architecture of control he has been building since he was twenty-two years old, brick by careful brick, demolished in approximately thirty seconds by six pounds of dark-haired human person who makes another announcement sound and grabs his finger with the unapologetic certainty of someone who has decided this is hers now.
He does not try to hide it. He does not perform composure or manage his expression into something more dignified for the room. He simply cries, openly, in a delivery room with Dr. Markov and two nurses present, with his daughter against his chest and his face undone.
It is the most unguarded I have ever seen him - and that includes the night at the piano and the hotel corridor and the kitchen in Brooklyn where his mother's name is carved into stone.
This is, apparently, the thing that breaks through my own composure after seven months of managing it with considerable effort.
I cry too.
Not elegantly. Not in the controlled, single-tear way I managed at the ultrasound. The full, unglamorous, unselfconscious version that has nothing to do with performance and everything to do with a feeling simply too large for the container.
"Irina Katarina," I say, when Dr. Markov asks.
I had told Nik weeks ago. He received it in the quiet, full-attention way he receives everything that matters to me. One name for each of their mothers.
Irina, for the woman who kept her ballet shoes and stood at a rink window and left food at a Brooklyn door in winter.
Katarina, for the woman who hummed Chopin under her breath and pressed a school uniform twice and died with her fingers still moving against a hospital blanket in the shape of a melody she never stopped carrying.
Both of them are in this room, in the way that people live on in the versions of themselves they leave behind in the people who loved them.
He brings her to me. He settles her against my chest with the careful attention he brings to things he understands are irreplaceable. She makes a small, protesting sound at the transition and then goes quiet.
I look down at her face - the dark eyes not yet focused, the dark hair, the concentrated seriousness of the newly arrived - and I feel something I have no clinical name for and no spreadsheet column for and no fifteen-minute block assigned to.
I understand my father differently at this moment. Not entirely - the eleven-year-old who looked through him at the dinner table and understood she had been outranked by grief is not dissolved by this - but differently.
I understand, holding Irina Katarina seven minutes after she has entered the world, how a person could look at something this consequential and be destroyed by the fear of losing it.
How the whole world could become dangerous by comparison with one six-pound fact. How a man who loved badly might still have loved completely, and how those two things are not the same and are also not mutually exclusive.
I forgive him a little. Not entirely. A little, which is honest and is therefore the correct amount.
"We are going to make mistakes," I say. To the room, to the baby, to Nik sitting on the edge of the narrow hospital bed with his arm around me and his daughter's hand still around his finger.
"Many," he agrees, with complete serenity.
"She is going to figure us out immediately."
"She has your face." He looks down at her. "Of course she is."
I look at Irina Katarina, who is looking back at me.
I have been moving toward something for seven months now, scheduling it for later the way I schedule everything that feels too large for the current slot - waiting for the correct moment, the correct version of myself who has processed sufficiently to say a true thing without needing it to be perfect first.
The correct moment turns out to be this one. Terrible hair. No sleep. A person I have just produced watching me with dark eyes that already look like they are storing information.
"I love you," I say to Irina Katarina. Then I look up at Nik, at the face that has been showing up in my peripheral vision and my café corner and my kitchen and my living room and every room I have occupied for seven months.
The face I have been declining to say this to because saying it out loud makes it auditable and auditable means vulnerable and vulnerable has always been the category I keep locked.