7. Jenna
CHAPTER SEVEN
Jenna
Icalled the after-hours line the way Grant told me to, and the nurse on duty asked me a series of calm, methodical questions, when did the ache start, was it constant or coming in waves, had I noticed any bleeding, any change in movement, and I answered all of them as steadily as I could manage while sitting alone on my living room floor with my back against the couch, because sitting upright had started to feel worse than anything else I tried.
"It's probably early labor starting," she told me. "But given how it's presenting, and given you're not quite thirty-eight weeks, I'd feel better if you came in and let us take a look, just to be safe."
"My husband's on his way home. We'll come in together."
"That's fine. Just don't wait too long."
I hung up and texted Grant that the nurse wanted me to come in, and I sat there in the quiet of our living room, the documentary about coral reefs still playing without sound because I'd muted it an hour ago and forgotten to turn it off, waiting for the sound of his car in the driveway.
I remember looking at the clock on the mantel, an old brass one that had been my grandmother's, and doing the math on when he should reasonably arrive, twenty minutes, he'd said, and watching the second hand move in a way that felt both impossibly slow and somehow, in retrospect, far too fast, because I hadn't yet understood how much could go wrong inside a single stretch of twenty minutes.
His text came instead. Something happened here, dealing with it, home soon, don't worry.
I read it three times before the meaning of it actually landed.
Something happened. Dealing with it. I knew, the way you know a true thing about your own life before you have proof of it, exactly what had happened and exactly who it involved, because there was only ever one thing capable of turning Grant around once he'd said he was already in his car.
I want to be honest that my first feeling wasn't panic.
It was something colder and more familiar, a kind of resigned, furious clarity, because I had told him, in a parking garage three weeks earlier, precisely this scenario, I need to know I won't have to compete for you, and he had promised me, with his hand on my belly and his voice steady and certain, that I never would.
And here it was. Here was the exact test I'd described, arriving on schedule, and he had failed it in the span of a single phone call.
I sat with the phone in my lap for a full minute after that, not moving, feeling the useless anger of a person who has just been proven right about something she desperately wanted to be wrong about.
I thought about calling Paige immediately, just to talk it through, just to have someone confirm that I wasn't overreacting to a text message, and I might have done exactly that if my body hadn't chosen that moment to make the decision for me.
I didn't have room to sit with the fury for long, because the ache that had been low and manageable for the last hour sharpened into something else entirely, a pulling, wrenching pain that made me gasp out loud in an empty house with no one to hear it.
I tried to breathe through it the way the birthing classes had taught me, and it didn't ease the way a contraction was supposed to ease.
It held. It got worse instead of better, and underneath it I felt a wetness that had nothing to do with my water breaking, warm and wrong, spreading against the couch cushion, and something in my body went from uncomfortable to frightened in the space of about ten seconds.
I called Grant. It rang four times and went to voicemail.
I called again. Same thing.
I don't fully remember deciding to call Paige instead of trying Grant a third time.
I remember my hands moving on their own, some animal part of my brain understanding faster than the rest of me that I didn't have time to keep calling a phone that wasn't going to be answered, that I needed a person who would pick up, right now, and drive.
I remember, in the strange, compressed clarity of that moment, briefly considering calling Grant's mother instead, some old instinct toward keeping family informed even in crisis, before recognizing, almost as fast as the thought arrived, that Ruth couldn't drive me anywhere in time and that I needed exactly one thing right now, a person close enough to act immediately, not a person to comfort me.
That single clear-eyed calculation, made in the middle of genuine fear, told me something about myself I hadn't fully known until that moment, that some steady, practical part of me remained intact even when everything else felt like it was breaking apart.
Paige answered on the first ring. "Hey, what's up."
"Something's wrong. There's blood, and the pain isn't stopping, and I can't reach Grant, and I don't know what to do."
She didn't waste a single second on questions that didn't matter. "I'm two minutes away. Unlock the door and sit somewhere you can get up from easily. I'm coming right now."
Those two minutes were the longest of my life up to that point, though I didn't yet know how many longer minutes the night still had waiting for me.
I sat on the floor by the front door with my hand pressed low against my belly, trying to feel Sophie move, trying to remember the last time I'd felt her move at all, and I prayed, not eloquently, not in complete sentences, just a kind of wordless, repeated please that filled up the space where my thoughts should have been.
I remember noticing, absurdly, that I was still wearing one sock, that I'd apparently lost the other one somewhere between the couch and the front door, and fixating on that small, ridiculous detail because it was easier than fixating on anything else.
Paige had grabbed the hospital bag from the front closet on her way out the door, the one we'd packed together weeks earlier and left staged by the entrance exactly for a moment like this one, though neither of us had said that out loud when we packed it, both of us privately hoping it would sit there untouched until a far calmer night than this one.
She tossed it into the back seat without breaking stride, already steering me toward the passenger door with a hand at my elbow.
Paige got me into her car with an efficiency that told me, later, how much she'd been holding herself together in that moment for my sake.
She'd left her own house so fast she was still in her pajama pants, a fact neither of us mentioned until weeks afterward, when it became, unexpectedly, one of the details we could finally laugh about.
She drove fast but controlled, one hand occasionally reaching over to squeeze my knee, telling me I was doing great, telling me the hospital was twelve minutes away, telling me Sophie was a fighter, she could already tell, she'd inherited it from her mother.
I called Grant again from the car. No answer.
I put the phone in my lap and watched the screen, willing it to light up, and when it finally did, it wasn't Grant calling me back on the number I'd dialed.
It was an incoming call, his name on the screen, and I couldn't make my hands work fast enough to answer it myself, so Paige took it on speaker without slowing down.
"I'm driving her to the hospital right now," she said, before he could get a word out. "You need to get there."
I heard his voice, tinny and frantic through the speaker, asking if I was okay, if the baby was okay, and I heard Paige tell him she didn't know yet, that was why they were going, and I sat in the passenger seat with my hand pressed to my stomach and listened to my sister say the thing I didn't have the strength to say myself.
"You were already supposed to be coming."
"I know. I'm on my way, I'm fifteen minutes out."
"You told her that an hour ago."
Paige ended the call before he could respond, and I let out a sound I hadn't planned to make, something between a laugh and a sob, because there was something almost unbearably clean about hearing someone else say the true thing out loud, the thing I'd been circling for weeks without quite landing on it.
He'd told me that an hour ago. He'd told me a version of that for three weeks, in a parking garage, at our kitchen table, at the front door with his tie half straight, and none of those promises had survived contact with an actual choice between me and someone else's emergency.
"I've got you," Paige said, glancing over at me for half a second before her eyes went back to the road. "We're almost there. Just breathe. I've got you, and Sophie's got you, and we don't need him to get through the next ten minutes."
I held onto that. I held onto my sister's voice and the white line of the hospital sign coming up ahead through the windshield, and I let go, for the length of that drive, of everything except the two of us and the daughter I hadn't met yet, who needed me to be steady more than she needed me to be furious, at least for a little while longer.
Paige kept up a steady stream of talk the whole way, half nonsense, half genuine reassurance, the kind of talk I understood, even through my own fear, was as much for her benefit as mine, a way of keeping her own hands from shaking on the wheel.
The pain came in waves now, sharper each time, and somewhere underneath the fear I understood, with a strange, detached clarity, that whatever was happening to my body was moving faster than anyone had planned for, and that by the time Grant arrived, wherever he currently was, however fast he was driving, he was going to be arriving into the middle of something that had already started without him.
I thought, absurdly, in the middle of all of it, about my mother, two states away, who wouldn't hear any of this until it was already over, and about the version of this night I'd pictured for months, Grant beside me, my mother on speakerphone the second we knew anything, a calm, orderly sequence of phone calls radiating outward from good news instead of this, a car full of fear moving through empty streets while the person who was supposed to be beside me raced toward us from somewhere I couldn't picture, having already made a choice I didn't yet fully understand, only that it existed, only that it had already changed the story of tonight before the night was finished happening.