25. Andrea #2
“You called it a giant waste of everyone’s brain cells last week.”
“Yeah, well.” His voice floats back. “Mine aren’t doing much lately anyway.”
He comes back with my tea and three different kinds of crackers, because he can’t bring one of anything anymore. He sets it all down and puts his hand on my belly, and the baby kicks it, right on cue.
“Hi, little one.” He says it soft. “Almost time.”
“Three weeks.” I lean into him. “Give or take.”
“I can’t wait to meet you.” He kisses my temple. “I can’t wait to see who we made.”
We watch the garbage show until my eyes get heavy. He walks me up to bed - our bed, our room, the way he does every night now - and pulls the covers up over me careful, like I might break.
“I love you,” he says.
“Love you too.” I’m already halfway gone. “Even when you’re a disaster.”
“I’m not a-”
“Night, Kirk.”
He huffs a laugh. “Night, parade float.”
I throw a pillow at him without opening my eyes. He catches it - I hear it - and climbs in beside me, and I fall asleep to the sound of him breathing and his hand warm on my belly.
The first contraction folds me over the bathroom sink at midnight.
I grab the edge and breathe through it, in for four, out for four, the way the class taught us, and when it finally lets go I look up at my own white face in the mirror.
Three weeks early.
“Kirk!”
***
Kirk is out of bed so fast he trips over his own feet.
“The bag! Where’s the bag?” He spins in a circle, wild-eyed, wearing one sock.
“By the door. Where we put it two weeks ago. Where you checked on it yesterday. And the day before.”
“Right. Right.” He takes a breath, grabs his jeans, misses the leg twice. “Okay. Okay. We’re doing this. Are we doing this?”
Another contraction answers for me. I grip the doorframe and breathe through it, and when I surface, my husband is beside me with one hand on my back and the other already holding my shoes, and his voice has gone steady even though his hands haven’t.
“Okay,” he says. “We’re doing this.”
Kirk times the next one against the kitchen clock while I lean on the island, and when he announces “six minutes apart” in the voice of a man reading launch codes, we both look at the hospital bag by the door, packed for two weeks, checked nightly, waiting for exactly this.
“Okay,” I say. “Okay. Call Dr. Halloran’s line. And Kirk? The next part goes in the car.”
The drive to the hospital is a blur of contractions and deep breathing and Kirk’s white-knuckled grip on the steering wheel. He runs every yellow light and at least one that had given up on yellow entirely.
“I’m right here,” he keeps saying. “I’m not leaving. I’m right here.”
“I know.” I squeeze his hand between contractions. “Eyes on the road.”
“Eyes on the road,” he repeats. “Right here and eyes on the road.”
We arrive and everything accelerates. Nurses. Monitors. Dr. Halloran, calm and competent, telling me I’m already five centimeters dilated.
“She’s three weeks early,” Kirk says. “Is that - should we be-”
“Thirty-seven weeks is full term’s front porch,” Dr. Halloran says. “Your daughter is fine. She’s just punctual for a different appointment than the one you made.” She snaps on her gloves. “You’re doing great, Andrea. This baby is ready.”
The hours blur together. Pain and relief and pain again.
Kirk never lets go of my hand, even when I squeeze hard enough to bruise.
Between contractions he feeds me ice chips and tells me terrible jokes, and during them he goes silent and solid, an anchor with a heartbeat, exactly the rock I asked him to be.
Somewhere past midnight, he reads me the waiting room texts between contractions, because the waiting room has opinions.
Melissa: Status. Now. Don’t make me come back there.
Clarence: Daniel has organized the vending machine snacks by food group. Send update before he starts on the magazines.
William: No rush. Eleanors keep their own schedule. Both of them always have.
Melissa: Tell my sister she’s a warrior and tell Eleanor her aunt already bought the socks.
“Tell her the warrior says the socks better be yellow,” I pant, and Kirk types it with his free hand, and three doors down my family laughs loud enough that a nurse goes to shush them and, reportedly, is given a snack from the fruit group instead.
And then, near the end, the monitors change their song.
“The cord is around the neck,” a nurse says, quiet and fast, and the room fills with new people moving with controlled urgency.
“What does that mean?” Kirk’s voice cracks. “What does that MEAN?”
“It means we move quickly,” Dr. Halloran says. “Andrea. Big push. Now.”
Terror tries to take my body and I refuse it entry, because my daughter needs the body working.
I push. Kirk’s hand crushes mine, his other arm bracing my shoulders, his mouth against my hair saying stay with me, stay with me, I’m here, I’m not going anywhere, ever, and the monitors are screaming and Dr. Halloran is counting and the whole world compresses to one task.
I push.
Silence. One terrible, endless, universe-swallowing second of silence.
And then - a cry. Thin and furious and perfect, the sound of a very small person who has opinions about all of this.
Eleanor Grace Burke-Graham arrives at 4:47 AM, weighing six pounds even, screaming as though she’s been personally insulted by the entire birth experience.
It’s the most beautiful sound I’ve ever heard.
Kirk cuts the cord. His hands shake so badly a nurse steadies his wrist, and tears stream down his face, and he doesn’t notice or care.
They place Eleanor on my chest. So small. So warm. Her cries gentle the moment she lands, her body recognizing my heartbeat, my scent, the only home she’s ever known.
“Hi, baby,” I whisper. “We’ve been waiting for you.”
Kirk leans over us, one hand on my shoulder, one hovering near her impossibly small head, afraid to touch her, unable not to.
“She’s perfect,” he breathes.
“We made her.”
“We made her.” His voice fractures on it.
He presses his lips to my damp forehead, then, with the care of a man handling the only one of a thing in existence, to our daughter’s. “Eleanor. Hi. I’m your dad.”
She yawns at him, colossally unimpressed, and he laughs and cries at the same time, and I love him so much in this moment that it presses against my ribs from the inside.
The family invades at seven, in shifts, per hospital policy and against hospital policy in roughly equal measure.
Melissa arrives first, inspects her niece with the thoroughness of a customs agent, pronounces her “objectively the best one they’ve ever made here,” and produces from her bag a single pair of yellow socks the size of thumbs.
William comes next and holds Eleanor in the crook of his arm with a competence that surprises everyone but him, murmuring to her in a low voice, and when we ask what he’s telling her, he says, “Trade secrets. Gin rummy fundamentals. She’ll need them.”
Clarence and Daniel wave through the nursery window with a hand-lettered sign that says WE HELPED, which is, in fairness, true.
My father calls from Florida at half past seven, and I hold the phone against Eleanor so he can hear her breathe.
He goes quiet the way he did the night I told him about the baby, and then he informs me, at a volume that suggests the hearing aid is still in a drawer, that he is on the first flight up in the morning and has already told the entire congregation.
“You did it, baby,” he says, and his voice does the thing my mother’s used to, steel under the sugar. “Burkes don’t bow.”
Later, when the room has emptied and Eleanor sleeps against my chest and the sky outside the window is turning the gray-pink of almost-morning, Kirk pulls his chair as close to the bed as it will go and takes my hand.
“Andrea.”
“Mm.”
“There’s one more thing I have to do.” His thumb moves over my knuckles. “Before the baptism. One last piece of the old life to put down. And I want to do it with you there.”
I study his face. Whatever it is, it’s already decided; I can see the peace of the decision sitting in him alongside the weight of it.
“Okay,” I say. “Whatever it is. Together.”
He kisses my hand, and Eleanor sighs in her sleep between us, and outside the window the sun comes up on the first day of the rest of everything.