Chapter 27
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Amy
The postpartum wing at the Brigham smells like industrial sanitizer, someone's leftover pad Thai, a vague mix of perfumes popular with grandmothers, and father flopsweat.
I am lying in a hospital bed with an IV saline drip, wearing mesh underwear the size of a parachute, and feeling the deepest exhaustion I have ever experienced in my life.
I am so happy, I could die. Except I cannot die, because I am a mother now.
"Baby Boy McCormick," Dr. Biswas says, reading from her clipboard. "Thirty-six weeks. Five pounds, two ounces. Paramedics said Apgar scores eight and nine. Lungs clear. Reflexes strong. Your mother and your mother-in-law did my job for me, Amy. I'm just the clean-up crew."
"They'll be thrilled to hear that. Please don't tell them. It will go directly to their heads and they'll insist on midwifing all grandkids from now on."
"No NICU. He's small, but he's doing beautifully.
We'll check on him through the night. Report any signs of respiratory distress—fast breathing, grunting, flaring nostrils, blue tinge around the lips.
The nurses will assess as well, of course.
But I don't expect any of that. He decided to come into the world on his own terms. He's a fighter. "
She glances at the television mounted in the corner, which is playing yet another clip of my husband.
"Clearly runs in the family."
She pats my leg and leaves. I look down at my son, who is asleep on my chest in a hospital-issue swaddle, his mouth slightly open, his fists curled against my collarbone.
The room is already losing the battle against gifts. They started pouring in about two hours ago.
A modest bouquet from Gregory Hannover. A massive spray of thistles and white roses from Hamish's former teammates.
A fruit basket from Roshani Desai with a card that says, "You married well.
He's a good man." An Edible Arrangement from Jody that could feed a boardroom.
Flowers from Carol. Flowers from Shannon and Declan.
A five-pound box of chocolates from Amanda and Andrew.
A gift bag from Tina at the gym, containing organic nipple cream and a onesie that says "DEFINITELY NOT POOP. "
Then people we don't know started sending things.
The broadcast went out to over a billion people. The clip is everywhere. Someone figured out which hospital I was transferred to, and now the deliveries are arriving faster than the nurses can process them.
A nurse named Denise—broad-shouldered, no-nonsense, the kind of woman who has managed far worse than a celebrity birth—appears in the doorway with three more bouquets and a Mylar balloon shaped like a bottle.
"More flowers. Also a box of expensive truffles from someone called Malcolm Rees, with a card that says, 'No hard feelings.' Want me to throw it away or set it on fire?"
"How about the break room?"
"That's already been set on fire once by the 1997 coffeemaker we complain about constantly."
"Can patients donate? I'll order a new coffeemaker right now. And I meant the chocolates, not the setting-on-fire part."
"You want all these chocolates to go to the nursing staff?"
"All of it. Every chocolate that comes in. You all deserve it more than I do."
Denise considers me for a moment and smiles, opening the truffles, holding the box out to me.
"Take some. You deserve it."
I take two and push the box back to her.
"You're the entire floor's favorite patient. Don't let it go to your head."
Through the open door, I can hear my mother and Fiona in the hallway, arguing with the intensity of arms negotiators at a summit neither intends to lose.
"I let you hold the baby first," Mom is saying. "The first photo goes on my Instagram."
"Ye havena posted on Instagram since 2019, Marie, and that was a picture of a salad."
"It was a beautiful salad! And the point is precedence. Maternal grandmother posts first. It's protocol."
"There is no protocol for social media announcements."
"There is! I read it in a parenting magazine!"
Fiona stops. I can almost see her breathing through her teeth in the particular way she has when she is recalibrating from fury to diplomacy. "Fine. We post at the same time. On the count of three."
"On the count of three," Mom agrees.
A pause.
"One."
"Two."
A longer pause.
"Marie, did ye just post?"
"Did you?"
"I asked first."
"I posted."
"YE WERE SUPPOSED TA WAIT FOR THREE."
"That was three! Once you said two, it was three! It was post-two, so it counts as three!"
I close my eyes. My son sleeps against my chest. The grands wage social media war in the corridor.
Somewhere over the Atlantic, my husband is on a jet flying toward us.
I'm lying in a hospital bed eating cold lo mein from a takeout container balanced on my thigh, no-longer-needed substances leaking out of my evacuated uterus, wearing a gown that ties in the back, and an icepack on my poor battered labia and taint.
My hair is unwashed. My body feels like it was taken apart and reassembled by a poorly programmed robot.
And none of it matters, because my baby is breathing in my arms, his heartbeat tapping against mine like a second clock.
The door opens suddenly.
It's been eight hours since the birth.
And here he is.
Hamish.
Suit jacket gone. Tie long gone. Shirt untucked, sleeves rolled to the elbows, armpits stained dark with sweat.
His jaw is shadowed with stubble, not the careful two-day scruff he maintains for cameras but the stubble that grows when a man has been crying and running and flying across an ocean with a singular goal.
His hair—the red-gold curls he tamed with product for the broadcast—is a wild mess, pushed back from his forehead like he's been dragging his hands through it for six hours straight, which I'm guessing he has.
His eyes are bloodshot, swollen, and the most beautiful shade of green I have ever seen.
He stands in the doorway, his shadow long. He looks at me, then his eyes lock onto the baby on my chest.
His face does something I have never seen it do. Not the pitch intensity. Not the tender look he gives me when he thinks I'm not watching. Not the broadcast composure. This is wholly new. This is a man seeing his first child for the first time.
Any trace of a social mask falls away at once, and what's left is so raw and open and enormous that I have to glance away for a second, then look back to memorize this. It's too much and not enough at the same time.
"Amy," he whispers.
"Hi."
He crosses the room, ignoring the flowers, the gift bags, the six-foot plush cow-giraffe standing in the corner (identical to the cursed one at home, this one sent by Vince with a card saying, "THIS REMINDS ME OF HAMISH"). He doesn't look at any of it.
He looks at me and the baby.
He sits on the edge of the bed. He puts his hand on my face, his palm warm and rough and shaking.
"I'm sorry. I'm so sorry I wasna there fer ye."
I promised myself I wouldn't cry when he arrived. The promise dissolves the second his hand touches my face.
"You were there." My voice cracks. "You were in my ear the whole time. Every second. Coaching me and making terrible football metaphors while I pushed a whole human being out of my body and our moms watched my butthole turn inside out."
"They weren't terrible."
"They were objectively terrible, and they were exactly what I needed."
He leans his forehead against mine. We stay there, just breathing.
"You need to meet someone," I whisper. "But first, wash your hands. You have germs from two continents on you."
He nods, laughs, sniffs, then scrubs quickly in the little sink, dries them with brown paper towels, and comes back with arms out. I lift our son—carefully, slowly, the way the nurse showed me, supporting his neck, keeping the swaddle tight—and place him in Hamish's arms.
Hamish takes him like he's made of something more fragile than glass. His enormous hands, hands that have caught crosses and thrown punches and gripped the arms of chairs during contract negotiations, cradle five pounds and two ounces of sleeping baby with a tenderness that is complete.
He looks at his son. Eight hours old. Oblivious to the billion-person broadcast, the career implosion, the helicopter, all of it.
Hamish's tears fall quietly and steadily. They drop onto the swaddle and darken the fabric in tiny circles.
"He's perfect," Hamish says. "He's so wee."
"He's early."
"But here he is."
He traces the baby's hairline with one finger.
Then the curve of his ear. Then his jaw, which is, undeniably, Hamish's jaw in miniature, set and stubborn even in sleep.
His hand covers the baby's entire back, fingers splayed, and I watch him realize that he is holding someone who will need him for the next eighteen years and beyond, someone who doesn't care about contracts or ratings or how many people watched him cry on television, someone who only needs warmth and steady hands and milk and the sound of his voice.
"I've made a mess of things," he says, not looking up. "I walked away from ma job. I owe Str1kecast millions. I detonated ma career on live television because—"
"Because you chose us."
"Aye."
"And you'd do it again."
"Every time."
I reach over and take his hand, the one not holding the baby.
"Then it's not a mess, it's a choice. And it was the right one. We tried too hard to make everything work, arranging ourselves around the responsibilities. Now we need to make our family work, and the rest gets rearranged around that."
He settles beside me against the pillows, our son in his arms, and for a moment we just exist, his head against my shoulder. The beeping monitors. The hallway sounds. The distant murmur of the grands, their ceasefire apparently holding.
"About the broadcast," I say.
"Aye?"
"I can't believe that happened."
"Which part?"
"The part where my vagina was on international television."
"Och. That."