Chapter 8
Duke
She looked up at me through the window, and my body knew before my brain did.
The face I carried out of a wedding months ago and never put down. For one second, the entire call stopped being a call and became the most specific thing that had ever happened to me.
Then training took over. Because it had to. Whatever I was feeling about the fact that the woman was Audrey Callahan was going to have to wait in line behind the procedure that was about to save her life.
I opened the door.
"Audrey. It's Duke. I'm here. We're going to get you out of this car."
Her eyes locked on mine. I watched her register who I was, watched the recognition land and get shoved aside by the contraction that was climbing her body. She nodded once, sharp, through her teeth.
I turned to Hank. He was three steps behind me, already reading the scene. His eyes went from Audrey's face to mine and stayed there for a beat.
Run it. I've got you.
He turned to the perimeter. I heard him on the radio behind me, his voice flat and steady, coordinating with the medic crew, getting Halsey to pull the engine forward to shield the shoulder from traffic.
Lou was already setting up the barrier. Micah was running the OB kit from the rig to the back of the medic unit, where the doors were open, and the stretcher was down.
Easton was at my shoulder.
"We need to move her," I said.
"Tell me what you need."
"Get the stretcher to the car. I'll take her weight."
Easton went. I got into the back seat beside her. The sedan was small, and the angle was wrong for everything I was about to do. I got my arm behind her shoulders. She grabbed my forearm with a grip that was going to leave marks, and I let her.
"Audrey. We're going to move you to the ambulance. I need you to let me take your weight. Can you do that?"
She looked at me. Through the pain, through the sweat on her face and the hair stuck to her temple, she looked at me with the clear-eyed focus of a woman who had spent six years on an L&D floor and knew exactly what was happening to her body.
"I can do that."
We moved her. Easton had the stretcher flush with the open car door. I took her weight out of the back seat, one arm under her shoulders, one at the small of her back. We got her onto the stretcher and into the back of the medic unit.
The contractions were ninety seconds apart by the time I'd put on my gloves.
I checked dilation. I did it fast, with my eyes on her face, and the number I got back told me we were not going to Hartsdale General for this delivery.
We were doing it here. On the shoulder of Route 9, in the back of a medic unit, with the engine idling ten feet behind us and the traffic going past in the far lane.
"Audrey. You're fully dilated. The baby's coming now."
"I know."
Easton was across from me. He had the vitals cuff on her arm and the pulse ox on her finger. He was doing his piece of the work without a word, leaving the patient interaction to me because the patient was Audrey, and both of us knew it.
The next contraction came. Her whole body bore down. I talked her through it.
"Good. That's good. Breathe through it. One more."
She breathed through it. She made a sound that I will hear for the rest of my life, a low, guttural thing that was not a scream but was past every other word I had for it.
I saw the crown.
"Almost there, Audrey. One more push. Give me one more."
She pushed. She gripped the rail of the stretcher with both hands, and her back came up off the surface, and she made the sound of a woman finishing something her body had been building toward for nine months.
The baby came into my hands.
She was small. She was wet, and red, and furious, and she came into the world screaming at the top of her lungs that were working.
I caught her. I held her with both hands, her body not as long as my forearm, the weight of her so slight it barely registered against the gloves, and the scream she was making filled the back of the medic unit and went out through the open doors into the afternoon.
I clamped the cord, cut it, wiped her face with the sterile cloth Easton put in my hand, cleared her airway, and wrapped her in the thermal blanket from the OB kit before I placed the baby on Audrey's chest.
The baby stopped screaming. Her body settled against her mother's skin, the furious red face pressing into the space below Audrey's collarbone, and the silence that replaced the screaming was louder than the screaming had been.
Audrey's hands came up. She placed them on the baby's back, both palms, fingers spread, holding the full length of her daughter against her chest.
I looked up at Audrey's face. She was crying.
"Hi," I said.
She looked up at me. The tears were still coming. She didn't wipe them. She didn't speak. She looked at me over the baby's head, and something passed between us that I couldn't name, because the moment was too large for any word I had, and because I didn't yet understand what I was looking at.
The ambulance doors closed. Easton was in the jump seat across from me. The siren came on a beat later, and we were moving.
The back of the ambulance was small, bright, and humming with the road.
I had work to do. Vitals on Audrey. Vitals on the baby.
Blood pressure, temperature, the small, steady tasks that came after a field delivery, and that my hands performed without consulting the rest of me.
The baby was on Audrey's chest, her color good, her breathing even, the thermal blanket tucked around her by hands that were still mine and still doing their job.
Audrey was staring at the ceiling. She had her arms around the baby, and her eyes were fixed on a point above her. She hadn’t looked at me since the moment after I said hi, when something crossed her face, and she turned away from it.
Easton was across from me, quiet, doing his own piece of the charting. He glanced at me once. I looked at the monitor.
The adrenaline started coming down somewhere past the bypass exit.
I felt it in my hands first. The fine tremor that showed up after every hard call, the body's way of announcing that the crisis was over, and the shaking could start.
I could hear the siren, the road under the tires, the baby making a small sound against Audrey's chest that was not a cry but was close to one.
I could hear my own breathing, which was faster than it should have been.
I was in the back of a moving ambulance with a woman I'd not spoken to in months and a baby I'd just delivered on the shoulder of a state highway. The adrenaline had been holding the questions at bay, and now that it was leaving, the questions were coming in behind it.
I looked at Audrey. She was still looking at the ceiling. The baby was against her chest. Her face was closed, shuttered, the wall back up, and I couldn't read what was behind it.
"Where's the father?" I asked.
My voice came out even. Professional. A paramedic asking a relevant question about the patient's support system, nothing more. I was still inside the story I'd been carrying since Main Street—the man she met after me, the relationship that moved fast. Easton glanced up from the chart.
Audrey didn't look at me. "He's not in the picture."
Even. Flat. Rehearsed. A sentence she had said before, to other people, enough times that the edges were smooth.
"I'm sorry," I said and meant it. I was sitting in a jump seat being sorry on behalf of a man I didn't know who had chosen not to be here for this, and the sorry was real, and I sat with it for a beat.
Then the math started.
Nine months. Nine months since the wedding. Nine months since the morning in her apartment when she sat on the edge of the bed in her robe and told me it couldn't be a thing, and I said okay, and we made the pact.
Nine months was a pregnancy.
The thought surfaced and would not go back under. The baby was full-term.
The story I'd been carrying since Main Street—the other man, the relationship I invented to explain what I saw—came apart one piece at a time.
There was no other man. There never was.
The version I built to let me take the bypass, skip the barbecues, and keep the pact intact was a version I'd made up because the truth was too large to carry without asking for it.
The charm reflex reached for a joke. Some version of light, deflected, the grin that had been getting me through rooms since I was seventeen. It left my mouth before I could stop it, and it was wrong the moment it hit the air.
"She's not mine, is she?"
The words landed in the ambulance like something dropped from a height. I heard them come back to me, heard how they sounded, heard the lightness I'd reached for curdle into something that wasn’t light at all.
Audrey said nothing. The monitor beeped. The siren kept going.
"Audrey." Quieter. The charm was gone. "Is she my child?"
Audrey looked at me.
She looked at me for a long time. She looked at me with her whole face open in a way I'd not seen since the morning after the wedding. Her eyes were wet. Her mouth was set.
She closed her eyes. She kept them closed for a few seconds, long enough that I thought she wasn't going to answer at all.
When she opened them, she nodded once.
The siren changed pitch. The ambulance slowed. I heard the tires catch the lip of the driveway, the change in road noise that meant we were off Route 9 and onto hospital concrete. The bay doors of Hartsdale General were ahead of us. I could feel the ambulance turning, easing into the bay.
The engine stopped.
The doors opened at Hartsdale General.
The hospital team came out. Two nurses, an ER resident, and the intake coordinator with the clipboard. The stretcher came out of the ambulance with Audrey on it, the baby on her chest, the thermal blanket tucked around both of them. They moved toward the doors.
I did the handoff because it was my job.
I stood at the back of the ambulance and gave the ER nurse the information she needed: patient, twenty-eight, full-term, field delivery on Route 9 at approximately fourteen-thirty-two, mother and baby both stable, baby pink and crying at delivery, Apgar eight at one minute.
The nurse took the sheet. The team took the stretcher. The doors slid shut behind them.
I sat down at the back of the ambulance.
The bumper was cold through my uniform pants. My elbows went to my knees. My hands hung between them. The bay was bright and smelled like exhaust and disinfectant. The late-afternoon sun was coming in at an angle through the bay doors. I sat in it without feeling it.
The crew was doing the post-call work around me. Halsey at the rig, checking something. Lou on the radio, the flat voice giving dispatch the clear. Micah restocking the jump bag ten feet to my left, glancing at me once and looking away.
Her face through the window. The baby in my hands.
The small nod in the ambulance. The nine months I spent taking the bypass home because I couldn't drive past her hospital.
The morning on Main Street when I saw her pregnant and told myself she had met someone else.
The relief I pretended to feel, and the loss underneath the relief that I pretended I didn't.
Nine months.
She carried my daughter for nine months and didn't tell me.
She worked her shifts. She drove herself to the hospital.
She pulled over on the shoulder of Route 9, three days past her due date, alone in a sedan, and called 911 instead of calling me.
I was ten minutes away. I was always ten minutes away.
I lived in the same town, worked in the same area she came to every day, and she chose the dispatcher over my number.
Across the bay, Easton was talking to Cap by the engine.
I could see them but not hear them. Easton's posture was the one he used when he was delivering information that mattered, straight-backed, hands at his sides.
Hank listened with one hand on the side panel, his face still, the mustache and the decades doing the work that younger men did with expressions.
At one point, Hank looked past Easton's shoulder at me. I looked at the concrete between my boots.
Easton came to the ambulance. He sat down beside me on the bumper.
"Talked to Cap," he said. "You're done for the rest of the shift. We'll cover."
I nodded. I didn't trust my voice.
We sat for a beat. The late-afternoon light was going yellow on the bay floor, and the engine was ticking as it cooled. The hospital at my back was holding a woman and a baby I couldn't yet figure out how to walk toward.
"Did you know?" I said.
Easton looked at me, his face steady.
"No." Quiet. "Astrid never told me who the father was. I always figured it was someone Audrey met recently."
The line landed, and I heard everything inside it. Astrid knew. Had known since the beginning, and kept the secret because Audrey asked her to.
Audrey held this alone. Completely, deliberately alone.
"Thank you," I said.
The thank-you was for more than the answer. It was for the bumper. For the shift coverage. For a man who sat beside me without making me perform a single thing I wasn’t ready to perform. Easton knew what the thank-you held. He didn't make me say more.
I stood up.
Hank was still by the engine. I got to him and didn't know what to say.
He put his hand on my shoulder. Solid. Heavy.
"Go in," he said.
I nodded and turned toward the hospital.