Chapter 23 #2
I look at the puddle. Clear. No intense odor. Warm.
My water broke.
I'm thirty-six weeks. Four weeks early. This was not the plan.
The plan was a controlled, scheduled, medically supervised delivery at Brigham and Women's with Dr. Biswas and a birth playlist Hamish spent three weeks curating and an overnight bag packed since week thirty-two, sitting by the front door, organized, labeled, ready—containing everything I could possibly need.
Except my husband, who is currently on live television in London talking about football to a woman named Roshani while a man named Malcolm tells him to have less banter.
This was not part of any plan.
I call Dr. Biswas and reach her answering service. I leave a message so calm and measured, the operator asks if I'm sure it's an emergency.
I text Hamish.
Me: My water just broke. Come home now
I stare at the phone. Nothing. He's live. I watched him go live twelve minutes ago on the screen still playing across the room. He's under studio lights with a plastic bug in his ear, and he cannot see this text.
The first real contraction hits seven minutes later.
It comes from everywhere at once. My abdomen locks down, and the back pain that I've been blaming on gym strain for three days fuses with it into a single wall of pressure that drives me forward, hands on the counter, head down, teeth clenched.
"Oh, God," Mom says. "Oh, God oh God oh God."
"I'm fine," I insist.
I am lying.
The contraction crests. My belly becomes a knot of hot wire.
I make a sound I've never made in my life—low, guttural, involuntary—the sound of a body doing something it wasn't fully prepared for despite the books and the four childbirth classes and every horror story my sisters and my mother have ever told me.
It passes. I breathe. The room comes back.
"Five minutes," Mom says, phone in hand, stopwatch running.
"You can't measure an interval from one contraction, Mom."
The second comes four minutes later. The third, three after that.
They're accelerating, each one harder than the last, and my back absorbs the worst of it. Between contractions, I can think. During them, I can't. I can only survive the thirty seconds and wait for air.
Mom is standing next to the six-foot plush, her arms wrapped around its torso, hugging it like it's a life preserver.
"This is too fast," she's saying, her cheek pressed against the plush's mangy fur. "This isn't how it works. First babies take forever. I was in labor with you for nineteen hours and you were my third—"
A contraction seizes me so hard, I can't breathe, can't speak, can't see anything except a white point at the center of my vision—
BANG
Not the buzzer. Not a knock. A flat-palmed, full-bodied assault on the front door that rattles the hinges.
"AMY! OPEN THIS DOOR, HEN!"
Fiona.
"How does she KNOW?" I gasp, turning to Mom. "DID YOU TELL HER?"
Mom, still hugging the plush, crosses herself—she's not Catholic, but these are not normal circumstances—and opens the door.
Fiona McCormick enters in trainers, joggers, and a jumper that says WORLD'S BEST GRAN, not even breathing hard, which means she sprinted from her condo and wasn't winded by it, which is easy to do when you're flying on your broom.
"How did you know?" I demand.
"I smelt it."
"You smelled WHAT?"
"Yer amniotic fluid. From down the street."
"That is not a thing, Fiona! That is physically, chemically, and geographically impossible!"
"I've had eight bairns, Amy. Ma nose kens things yer science canna explain." She drops to her knees in front of me with a calm that borders on the geological. Her hands go to my belly. Her eyes read me the way Hamish reads a pitch. "How far apart?"
"Three minutes," Mom reports from behind the plush.
"Back labor," Fiona says. "The bairn's sunny-side up. Posterior."
My stomach drops through the floor.
"Posterior—she flipped? The baby's breech again? After everything Coyote did—"
"No' breech, hen. Posterior means she's facin' forward instead of facin' yer spine. Her wee head is pressed against yer sacrum. That's why yer back's been murderin' ye fer days." She looks at me with knowing eyes. "Ye thought it was a pulled muscle."
"I thought it was an orgasm injury."
Fiona doesn't blink.
"Aye, McCormick men will do that ta ye. Fergus has magic seed, ye ken? Fer the two o' mine what overstayed their welcome, if we had sex enough times, Fergus's spunk unlocked ma cervix like - "
It's like hearing Mom talk, only with a Glaswegian accent.
She keeps going. "Wi' Hamish, Fergus was watchin' darts.
I told him the bairn was comin' and he said, 'Can ye wait till the ad break?
' I had back labor fer fourteen hours and he brought me one cup of tea, one biscuit, and the words, 'Ye're doin' grand, Fi,' and then went back ta the darts.
Yer husband at least has the excuse of bein' in another country. "
"There he is!" Mom points to the TV.
Fiona turns to the screen and beams.
"There's ma son!"
My phone rings. I grab it and punch speakerphone.
"Amy, it's Dr. Biswas. Tell me what's happening."
I give her the rundown between contractions: water broke, three minutes apart and intensifying, back labor, thirty-six weeks.
"What color is the fluid?"
"Clear."
"Good. I need you to get to Brigham and Women's as soon as you can. Do you have transportation?"
"The road is blocked!" Mom leans toward the phone. "There's a terrible accident! I had to park four blocks away and there were detours and fire trucks and a very rude man in a BMW—"
"Is there an ambulance available?"
"I called 911 already! They said the ambulance is stuck in the same accident!"
Biswas pauses.
"Can you walk to the hospital from your home?"
A contraction hits and I drop to my hands and knees. The sound I make answers the question for all of us.
"Dr. Biswas," Fiona says, picking up the phone, "this is Fiona McCormick, Amy's mother-in-law. I've had eight bairns, two of them back labor. This baby is posterior and she's bearing down."
"Is she feeling rectal pressure?"
"Other than my mother-in-law?" I gasp out.
Fiona clears her throat. "Aye."
"She needs to come in now. I'm sorry, but I have to go—another patient needs me. I'll alert the hospital you're on your way."
Fiona sets down the phone and stares at me.
The contraction passes and I catch my breath. Fiona is blocking the hallway to the bathroom with her body, feet planted shoulder-width apart, arms at her sides, like a goalkeeper defending a penalty.
"Move," I say.
"No."
"I need the bathroom."
"Ye dinna need the bathroom."
"Fiona, I am telling you, I need to go to the toilet. Right now. This is not negotiable."
"That's no' what ye think it is, hen."
"It is EXACTLY what I think it is. I know what this feeling is. I've been pooping my entire life. I am an expert in this particular sensation and I am telling you—as someone with thirty-two years of experience in this area—that I need to use the bathroom IMMEDIATELY."
Mom looks between us.
"Should I—should we let her go?"
"NO," Fiona shouts, and I burst into angry tears.
"Why are you so obsessed with my butt?" I scream at her.
"I dinna give an arse about yer arse, child. Yer having a baby and I'm assumin' ye'd prefer no' ta have the bairn's head stuck in the loo."
Mom touches my arm.
"What you're feeling is not a bowel movement."
"Mom, it IS a bowel movement. I had fiber cereal this morning. I had an apple at lunch. My digestive system is FUNCTIONING and I need to—"
Another contraction. This one comes from the core of the earth.
It rips through my pelvis and my back and my lungs and every illusion I ever had about what pain is.
I grab Fiona's arm and squeeze so hard, I feel her bones shift.
She doesn't flinch, she just breathes with me, steady as bedrock.
Mom appears behind me, grabs my hips, and squeezes them inward, hard, pressing the bones together, and something deep in my pelvis releases.
I moan with a relief so raw, it doesn't sound like me.
"That's good," Fiona says. "The hip squeeze helps. Marie, dinna stop."
"I learned this from a YouTube video," Mom says, her voice trembling but her hands iron.
They look at each other over my back, my mother and my mother-in-law. Two women who have spent years circling each other, competing over holidays and wedding venues and who gets to throw the baby shower.
They lock eyes. Something passes between them.
Mom releases my hips and runs to the cabinet.
She fills the biggest pot with water, sets it to boil.
Pulls every clean towel from the linen closet.
Disappears into the bathroom, reappears with the shower curtain liner, and spreads it across the living room floor.
At the same time, Fiona assembles supplies without being directed: trash bags, tennis balls from the hall closet, washcloths, the rice pack from the microwave.
They don't coordinate, they don't speak, they just move, together, like all the competition was a warm-up for this.
Olympic level grandmidwifery.
A contraction doubles me over on the shower curtain. Fiona kneels in front of me. Mom presses the tennis balls into my sacrum, rolling them in hard circles, and the counter-pressure is the only thing standing between me and screaming. When it passes, I lift my head.
"I just need to catch my breath," I say. "Then we're going to the hospital. First babies take forever. We have time. I need my epidural. And the baby's only thirty-six weeks, Dr. Biswas is waiting, we need a NICU if something's wrong—"
Fiona puts her hand on my cheek. Her palm is warm and rough and lovingly steady.
She looks so much like Hamish right now, I feel an endorphin rush, her love shining in her eyes.
Both softer and grittier at the same time, her jaw sets with determination.
I feel safe. Terrified, but somehow safe with her and Mom here.
"Amy," she says, her voice the calmest thing in the room. "This bairn is about ta be born right here, hen. Right now."