19. Hannah
— ? —
Hannah
Labor is twenty-three hours of hell.
The first contraction wakes me from a dead sleep, and it’s not one of the practice ones I’ve been having for weeks. It’s sharper, more insistent. I lie in bed for a few minutes, staring at the ceiling, waiting to see if it happens again.
It does. Eight minutes later. Then seven. Then six.
I time three more contractions with the app he made me download, the one he texted me about with a five-bullet explanation of why it was the best-reviewed one, and then I sit on the edge of my bed in the dark with my hand on my belly.
“Okay,” I tell her. “Okay, baby girl. Let’s go meet everybody.”
I call Griffin at 5:15 a.m.
“It’s time,” I say when he picks up on the first ring, because he always picks up on the first ring now, at any hour, a fact I have tested more than I’ll admit. His voice is groggy with sleep for exactly one word.
There’s a crash on the other end of the line, like he’s knocked something over getting out of bed. “I’m coming. Don’t move. Are you okay? How close together are they?”
“About six minutes. And I’m fine. Mostly. I mean, it hurts like hell, but I’m fine.”
“I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”
“Griffin, you live twenty minutes away.”
“Fifteen minutes.”
He makes it in twelve, and I spend those twelve minutes doing a final sweep of the go-bag I packed six weeks ago, the one he asked about at every appointment until I sent him a photo of it just to end the conversation, and breathing through two more contractions with my forehead against the cool of the refrigerator door.
I don’t ask how many traffic laws he broke. I don’t really care. I’m too busy breathing through another contraction while he helps me into the car, his hands steady even though his face is pale with worry.
“You’ve got this,” he says as he pulls out of the parking lot. “You’re the strongest person I know. You’ve got this.”
“Stop being nice to me. It’s weird.” It is weird, is the thing. Nine months of careful distance and now he’s cheerleading me through contractions at dawn, and my body can’t decide whether to lean into his voice or brace against it, so it’s doing both, the story of us in one car ride.
“I’m always nice to you.”
“No, you’re always charming. There’s a difference.”
He laughs, a short, nervous sound. “Fair enough. How are you feeling?”
“Like something’s trying to escape through my pelvis. How do you think I’m feeling?”
“Right. Stupid question.”
The hospital admits me right away. Apparently being dilated to five centimeters earns you VIP treatment. They put me in a private room, hook me up to monitors, and offer me an epidural that I accept with embarrassing eagerness.
“No judgment,” the anesthesiologist says when I practically beg him to hurry, a cheerful man with the bedside manner of someone who is, at this moment, the single most beloved human being in my entire life. “Everyone has a different pain tolerance. Yours is just… low.”
“My pain tolerance is fine. This is just an unreasonable amount of pain.”
Griffin snorts from his chair in the corner, where he has set up a small command center, my water, my phone charger, the go-bag unpacked into tidy rows, a printed birth-plan checklist he produced from his jacket that I refuse to acknowledge on principle. I glare at him.
“Something funny?”
“Nothing. You’re doing great.”
“I’m doing terrible. I’ve been here for three hours and I’m only at six centimeters. At this rate, she won’t be born until next week.”
“The doctor said it could take a while for first babies. That’s normal.”
“I don’t care about normal. I want her out. Tell the doctor. Escalate it. You’re good at escalating things, escalate my cervix.”
“I don’t think that’s…”
“Griffin.”
“Escalating. Yes. On it.”
He gets up from his chair and comes to stand beside my bed. His hand finds mine, and I let him hold it even though I’m still annoyed at him for laughing.
“What can I do?” he asks. “Anything. Name it.”
“You can invent a time machine and skip me ahead to the part where this is over.” He nods with total seriousness and says he’ll get his best people on it, and for one ridiculous second, mid-contraction, in a hospital gown, I almost laugh.
“I’ll work on that. In the meantime?”
“Just… stay. Don’t leave.”
The words are out before I can vet them, and we both hear everything folded inside them, every other room he ever left, every dinner that ended with his headlights backing down a driveway. His hand tightens around mine.
“I’m not going anywhere.”
He means it. I can tell from his face, from how he’s looking at me. Whatever else has happened between us, whatever else is broken, he’s here. He’s not leaving.
That has to count for something. I’m too far into this to do the math on exactly what.
My parents are four hours away and driving, my mother narrating their progress by text in real time: gas station, construction on the interstate, your father refuses to stop for lunch.
The next several hours blur together into a haze of contractions and ice chips and nurses checking my progress every thirty minutes.
Griffin stays beside me the whole time, holding my hand, rubbing my back, telling me terrible jokes that I’m too exhausted to laugh at but appreciate anyway.
“Why did the scarecrow win an award?” he asks around hour twelve, and I recognize what he’s doing, because I watched him do it in boardrooms for years, reading the room, managing the energy, keeping the client from spiraling.
Except the client is me, and the stakes are us, and there’s no deal at the end of this except a person.
“I don’t care.”
“Because he was outstanding in his field.”
“That’s the worst joke I’ve ever heard.” And it is, objectively, and he knows it is, and that’s the whole point of it, a man with a billion-dollar vocabulary deploying dad jokes at hour twelve because good jokes would demand energy I don’t have and bad ones only ask me to roll my eyes.
“You smiled. I saw you smile. I’m counting it. It’s going on the board.”
“I was grimacing in pain.”
“It looked like a smile to me.”
At hour sixteen, I hit transition. The contractions come faster and harder, and even with the epidural, I can feel the pressure building.
I grip Griffin’s hand so tight I’m probably cutting off his circulation, but he doesn’t complain.
He just keeps talking to me, his voice low and steady, an anchor in the chaos.
“You’re doing so well. I’m so proud of you. You’re almost there.”
“I hate you.”
“I know.”
“I really, really hate you.”
“I know. You’re doing great.”
“This is your fault.”
“Technically, and I say this with enormous love and from a safe distance, it takes two people to…”
“Griffin, I swear to God, if you finish that sentence, I will murder you with my bare hands.”
He shuts up. Smart man.
Around hour eighteen, my parents arrive.
My mother takes one look at Griffin, at his rumpled shirt and his death grip on my water cup and the terror he’s wearing openly, and I watch nine years of judgment go to war with sixty seconds of evidence.
She doesn’t hug him. But she sends him to the cafeteria for coffee and tells him which kind I’d want, and from my mother, that’s a visa.
At hour twenty, the doctor tells me I’m finally ready to push.
“Oh thank God,” I say, or maybe sob. It’s hard to tell at this point. Everything from the waist up has merged into one continuous state of leaking.
The pushing manages to be both better and worse than the contractions. Better because I finally feel like I’m doing something, like I’m working toward an actual goal. Worse because it’s exhausting in a way I didn’t know was possible, every muscle in my body straining, every breath a struggle.
Griffin is right beside me, his arm around my shoulders, his voice in my ear.
“Come on, Hannah. You’ve got this. Push. Push.”
“I am pushing!”
“Push harder. You’re so close. She’s almost here.”
“You push harder! You try squeezing a watermelon out of a…”
“I see the head!” the doctor announces. “One more big push, Mom. Give me everything you’ve got.”
I push.
I push with everything I have, every ounce of strength and determination and sheer stubborn will that’s gotten me through the past nine months. I push until I think I’m going to pass out, until I’m screaming through gritted teeth, until everything whites out at the edges.
And then the room changes.
A cry.
Not mine. Hers. Furious and thin and enormous, the loudest sound in the history of the world, a sound I have been waiting nine months and my whole life to hear.
“She’s here,” the doctor says, and suddenly there’s a baby in my arms, red and wrinkled and absolutely furious, screaming at the top of her tiny lungs.
“Oh my God,” I breathe. “Oh my God.”
They put her on my chest, and the world reorganizes itself around seven pounds, four ounces.
She’s perfect. She’s so incredibly, impossibly perfect. Ten fingers, ten toes, a full head of dark hair that’s slicked to her scalp with vernix. Her eyes are squeezed shut, her mouth wide open in outrage at being evicted from her cozy home.
“Hi, baby,” I whisper through my tears, and the name we circled for weeks in the app, the name I tested out loud in the car and whispered to my belly in the bath, comes out of me like it’s been waiting behind my teeth. “Hi, Eliza. I’ve been waiting for you.”
Eliza. Elizabeth, for the inscription in a book from a boy who called himself my Mr. Darcy, back when I believed in him.
I almost didn’t choose it for that reason.
Then I decided the name belonged to me and to her, whatever its history, the same as everything else I built inside that marriage. We keep what’s ours.
I hear a sound beside me and look up to see Griffin crying.
Not just a few tears. Full-on sobbing, his shoulders shaking, his face crumpled. He’s staring at our daughter like she’s the most miraculous thing he’s ever seen, like he can’t believe she’s real.
“I’m sorry,” he chokes out. “I’m so sorry. We should have done this together. We should have done all of it together… the appointments, the baby classes, the nursery. I should have been there from the beginning. I should have…”
“Griffin.”
He stops, his breath hitching.
“Do you want to hold her?”
He nods, not trusting his voice.
I pass our daughter into his arms, and he takes her like she’s made of glass, carefully, reverently, like he’s afraid he might break her. She settles against his chest, her cries fading to soft whimpers, and something shifts in his face. Something I’ve never seen before.
“Hi, Eliza,” he whispers, and his voice cracks clean down the middle on her name. “I’m your dad. I’m so sorry I’m already crying. I promise I’m usually cooler than this.”
“No you’re not,” I say.
“No I’m not,” he agrees. “But I’m going to try to be. For you. I’m going to try to be everything you deserve.”
He looks up at me, his eyes still wet, his expression open and vulnerable in a way I’ve rarely seen from him.
“Thank you,” he says. “For letting me be here. For giving me this.”
“She’s your daughter too.”
“I know. But you didn’t have to let me be part of it. After everything I did, after everything I put you through… you could have shut me out. You had every right to shut me out.”
“I know.”
“But you didn’t.”
“No. I didn’t.”
We look at each other over our daughter’s head, both of us wrecked and leaking and running on no sleep, him with vernix on his sleeve and me with my hair glued to my forehead, and it occurs to me that no one else on this earth will ever be inside this moment with me.
Whatever we are now, whatever we become, he is the other person in this room for the rest of our lives.
And a current passes between us. Not forgiveness, exactly, and not reconciliation, but an acknowledgment, maybe. A recognition that whatever else we are to each other, we’re also this: the parents of this tiny, perfect, furious little person.
“I love you,” Griffin says quietly. “Both of you. Pretend you didn’t hear it if you have to, but I do. I love you so much.”
I don’t say it back. I’m not ready. I don’t know if I’ll ever be ready.
But I don’t tell him to stop saying it, either.
Later, after the doctors have checked us both over, after the nurses have helped me try to breastfeed for the first time, which is harder than it looks, by the way, nobody warns you, after Griffin has gone down to the gift shop and come back with a stuffed elephant, a stuffed giraffe, and a stuffed thing that might be a manatee because he “couldn’t decide and she shouldn’t have to settle,” after the adrenaline has faded and exhaustion has settled all the way into my bones, I drift off to sleep.
When I wake up, the room is dark except for a small lamp in the corner, and someone has tucked a second blanket over me, and there’s a cup of the good ice chips, the crushed ones from the third-floor machine that the day nurse swore she’d never reveal the location of, sweating gently on my tray.
Griffin is asleep in the chair beside my bed, his head tilted at an angle that’s going to hurt when he wakes up.
And in the bassinet next to me, Eliza sleeps too, her tiny hand wrapped around Griffin’s finger even in sleep.
I watch them together in the dim light.
My daughter and the man who broke my heart.
And a door I’ve kept bolted for months eases open in me.
I’m not ready to name what’s behind it yet.
But it’s there, and it has ten fingers and ten toes and it’s wrapped around his finger in a hospital bassinet, and there’s no putting any of this back how it was.
Some part of me stopped wanting to. I couldn’t tell you when.