Chapter 5 #2
I went back to mine. I picked up the pen. My hand was steady. The notes on Mrs. Okafor's delivery were thorough and precise, because the part of me that did this job was still doing it, and would keep doing it, and had never once let the rest of my life onto the page.
I finished the chart. I filed it. I walked down the corridor toward the supply closet because I needed gauze for the room Lin was prepping, and because walking gave me something to do that wasn't standing still with the math in my head.
The corridor window was on my left.
I stopped.
The window looked out over the ambulance bay two stories down. A Hartsdale engine was idling in the bay to drop off a patient. Two firefighters were at the back of the rig. I didn't recognize the first one. The second was Duke.
He was leaning against the bumper with a coffee cup in his hand, talking to the other firefighter with the posture I'd catalogued without meaning to—relaxed, easy, his weight on one hip, the dimple probably out though I couldn't see it from here.
He looked like he always looked. Comfortable.
Certain. A man standing exactly where he was supposed to be standing, doing exactly what he was supposed to be doing.
He didn't see me.
The staff bathroom at the end of the corridor was a room I'd been in a thousand times. Small, institutional, the lock on the door a turn-bolt that stuck if you didn't push it past the catch. The light was the same fluorescent as the rest of the floor. The mirror was the same scratched chrome.
I'd fixed my hair in this mirror between deliveries, splashed water on my face after long labors, stood at this sink at three in the morning, telling my reflection to keep going because a patient needed me, and I could sleep when the shift was over.
I locked the door and leaned against it.
The test was in the pocket of my scrubs.
I opened the package and read the instructions I didn't need to read, because I'd explained them to patients more times than I could count.
I could walk a twenty-year-old through a pregnancy test at two in the morning with warmth and calm and a steady voice that said, this is not the end of the world.
This is information. We're going to figure this out together.
I wasn’t able to say any of those things to myself.
I took the test, set it on the edge of the sink, looked at my watch, and set a timer for three minutes.
Three minutes is not a long time. I'd waited three minutes for a contraction to peak.
I'd waited three minutes for a fetal heart rate to stabilize after a deceleration.
I'd waited three minutes in the hallway while a doctor made the call on a C-section, and every one of those waits had been manageable because I was waiting for information about someone else's body, and the waiting was a professional skill I'd trained into myself, and the distance between me and the answer was the distance between a nurse and her patient.
There was no distance now.
I was the patient. I was the woman on the edge of the exam table with her hands in her lap, waiting for a number to change her life.
I was the twenty-year-old at two in the morning who needed someone to tell her it was going to be okay, and I was also the nurse who knew that okay was a word you used when you didn't have a better one.
I sat on the closed toilet lid. I put my hands on my knees.
My mother was the first place my mind went.
The kitchen on Birch Hill, the good plates, the coffee, the question she asked every Sunday—is there someone?
—and my answer every Sunday that there wasn't. She would find out.
She would hear that I was pregnant by a man I'd slept with once at a wedding, and she would not be angry.
She would be patient, kind, and careful, and the patience would carry the weight of every fear she had ever had about the choices I made, the men I made them with, and the weight of it would be the heaviest thing I'd ever felt in her kitchen.
Then Duke. His hand on my elbow on the porch steps. The look he gave me over the rim of his glass at the table under the string lights. My name in his mouth in my bedroom—not Callahan, the real one—and how different it sounded when there was nothing between us but skin and honesty.
And the pact. This can't be a thing. I'd said it. He’d agreed. We’d both meant it.
A pregnancy was not a thing—it was a detonation, a line through the center of every agreement we’d made, and I was sitting in a hospital bathroom waiting to find out if the life I'd built was about to change shape in a way I couldn't build back from.
I wanted to call someone. I wanted to pick up the phone and hear a voice that would tell me what to do.
But the person I would have called was Astrid, and the thing I would have been calling about was a baby fathered by Astrid's husband's best friend, and the conversation I would need to have was not a phone call—it was a doorway, and I wasn’t ready to stand in it.
My watch said two minutes.
I'd spent twenty-eight years building a life that didn't require anyone to hold it in place.
I chose every job, every apartment, every morning I woke up alone, as proof that I was not my mother.
I was not the woman at the kitchen table at eleven o'clock, waiting for a man to call back.
I was not the woman who set the extra chair.
I was the woman who took the chair away.
A baby was a chair I couldn't take away.
A baby was a permanent seat at a table I'd built for one, and the man who belonged in that chair was a firefighter I'd agreed to forget.
I'd not forgotten him, and the not-forgetting was about to become visible in a way no amount of architecture could contain.
Three minutes.
I stood up. I walked to the sink. I looked down.
Two pink lines.
I picked up the test. I held it under the fluorescent light. The lines were clear, unambiguous, a result that left no room for the theory I'd been living inside for three weeks. I set it on the edge of the sink and stared at it, and for a moment, the room was very quiet.
I went back downstairs. I took two more tests from the ER supply room and a bottle of water from the staff room. I went back to the staff bathroom, guzzled water, and took them both.
They were all the same.
I sat on the closed toilet lid with three positive tests on the edge of the sink, my hands on my knees, and the shift ending in forty minutes.
The fluorescent light buzzed. The lock held.
Somewhere on the other side of the door, the L&D floor was running as it always ran—monitors beeping, voices in the hall, the steady machinery of women bringing children into the world—and I was sitting in the bathroom with the proof that I was about to become one of them.