Chapter 42
“Deep breath,” I say firmly. “Deep breath.” And then, “Yes. Yes, yes, yes.” I chant it, keeping my voice low and strong.
“Yes. Yes. Yes!” my wonderful client Tamar gasps.
“Nice and low,” I murmur.
“Yes. Yes. No!”
“Yes. You’re amazing. You’re doing an amazing job,” I tell her.
She is clinging to my hands, kneeling in the puffy inflatable orange birthing tub, which is set up in her tiny living room with the couch pushed back.
I’m in front of her, our faces close together.
Her tightly curled hair is plastered to her forehead, and I want to brush it back but can’t free up a hand to do that.
Her handsome husband, Rahim, is kneading her back with all his might.
It’s a perfect early April afternoon, sweet light washing through the latticed window.
The old magnolia tree in the yard is just beginning to open tentative, velvety blossoms above the newborn green of the grass, and a full moon gathers itself behind the pale curtain of daylight.
The air smells like wet earth and promises. A good time for a birth.
Lillian, my favorite home-birth midwife, is reading a book on the couch, engrossed, her ankles crossed in her worn jeans.
Her socks have a cheerful pattern of brown, pink, and green wool.
The birth is normal—she doesn’t have to do anything until the very end, when she’ll spring into action.
Her stuff is set up in the kitchen, all the medical paraphernalia Tamar will most likely never even see: a surgical kit, oxygen, a fetal heart monitor.
I helped Lillian wheel it in in a giant suitcase.
I’m guessing we’re pretty close to transition now, and after that, pushing will probably be fairly quick, since this is Tamar’s third. The other kids are with her mom.
“I’m opening up to meet my baby,” whispers Tamar. “I’m opening up to meet my baby.”
It’s one of the standard mantras. I’m proud of her for applying it. “Yes, you are,” I affirm. “That’s exactly what you’re doing. You’re going to meet your baby so soon.”
“I’m opening up to meet my baby,” she chants into my face, then moans as the contraction crests. They’re very close together now, she’s hardly getting a break in between.
“What a lucky baby,” I say. “What a lucky mama.”
Rahim blinks back tears, wipes his eyes quickly. Such a sweet man. I love this little family.
“Rahim!” Tamar demands, the second he isn’t touching her.
“On it!” He glances up and we grin at each other over his wife’s bent head.
His glasses are fogging from the warmth of the tub water against the cool air.
Lillian wants it to be really warm in a birthing room, and I’m guessing we have about five minutes before she gets up to find the thermostat and crank up the heat.
That’s always my signal that we’re getting down to business.
But right now she’s just calmly turning a page.
I look up at Rahim again. I always did like a man in glasses. Stop it, I tell myself. Focus.
I have been on a few dates recently. I took the train into the city for one and the guy was perfectly polite, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that he’d hoped for something else.
Someone more exciting, maybe. Someone who knows how to make her hair and lips look fuller.
The last one, though, had promise. He smiled a lot, talked a lot.
His name is Gideon, which is a good name, I think.
He’s hiked the Appalachian Trail, goes surfing down the shore.
He’s a coder, works partly from home. Nice beard.
Nice everything, really. The sex was good.
A little awkward, which is to be expected when you’re getting to know someone.
I love the awkwardness, too, though. I love that I can meet someone, can sleep with him just because I feel like it. Because I won’t kill him.
I won’t kill anyone ever again. I am a normal woman now.
A regular woman who is about to turn thirty-four and reads a little less erotica than she used to (though I will never give up the romance novels).
Who is still homeschooling her sensitive, fierce niece and picking up new clients for her growing doula business.
A woman who is playing guitar again for the first time since high school so she can write a song about her brother and share it with his stepdad (who she’s been talking to).
A woman who is learning to accept. Who is finding herself fairly good at acceptance.
Maybe it’s all the meditation. Maybe it’s the fact that my life is not a bad life. It’s a very pleasant life. A life with loss and sadness, with missed chances, with regrets, like any other, and okay, obviously a few more dead bodies than average, but overall I’m doing decently well, considering.
Not, maybe, Mom level—she and Al are off on an RV road trip to see the country. They’re supposed to be gone for six months.
Pain demons are eternal, as it turns out, and apparently between kitten videos and Beethoven sessions, he taught her how to summon him.
She remembered his instructions during a tarot-and-weed session of her yoga club.
This time he is six foot four and seems to be Samoan.
His voice is very deep and rumbling. But he’s exactly the same.
He does exactly the same series of eager little nods.
He’s addicted to sugar and TikTok and Ella misses him already.
Dee found a babysitter, a kind college student with a flexible schedule, to watch Ella while I’m working and when I need some time off. Since Dee has even less time now in her new role than she did before. She’s had to fly down to Austin twice in the past month.
“God!” Tamar yells abruptly. “Fuck! God!”
Lillian puts her book down and stands up. She stretches, runs a hand over her short hair. She goes off to find the thermostat.
“Good news,” I tell Tamar, who is moaning into the plastic of the tub’s rim. “This baby is almost ready to be born.”
* * *
The baby is a girl. They don’t have a name yet.
They were waiting to meet her. She has latched well and is still nursing when I come back into the bedroom to check on the family after wrapping up the placenta in a lot of tinfoil and storing it in a marked ziplock bag in the freezer, as requested.
I also caught up with Lillian while we cleaned.
She’s planning a big getaway for her fifty-fifth birthday.
I bring Tamar some lentils and rice in a creamy brown sauce. I hand the bowl to Rahim along with a kitchen towel, take a glass back to the kitchen for a refill of coconut water.
“T, sit with me,” Tamar says, smiling. She’s pale and giddy and limp. “Look at all that hair!”
We both study the baby. “Perfect!” I say.
She nods. “Hey, can I ask you a favor?”
“Of course.”
“Would you mind singing something? That song you were singing with Safi”—her three-year-old—“at our appointment? I love your voice so much. I just want it to be one of the first sounds this little girl hears in the world.”
I smile. “Yeah, of course.” I remember I was singing the little song that Ella and I made up.
The one about the heart-shaped stone in the forest. I start to sing it softly.
Tamar closes her eyes. I sing it through, and she’s moving her head to the rhythm, so I start over, letting my voice carry a little more.
Lillian pokes her head in to listen for a second.
“Wow,” she says. “Woman of many talents.” And then she goes to answer the door because Tamar’s mom is coming back with the kids.
Except it isn’t the grandmother and the kids.
I stop singing mid-phrase.
Tamar opens her eyes. “Oh, sorry, T. I totally forgot to tell you. This is our family’s doctor, Doctor Tav. He agreed to do the first checkup here. Because he’s the kindest human alive.” She is beaming at him. “Doctor Tav, this is my incredible doula, T— ”
“We’ve met,” says Joel from the doorway. His voice seems deeper, warmer—my brain has failed these past months to re-create it in its fullness—but it has the same unmistakable calm.
I haven’t seen him since the day Dick Face died.
Since the immortal who had loved him tired of our inability to choose a brother and returned us seamlessly to Joel’s front lawn, my arm slung across the cold brick of the path.
Since he shut the forest-green door, and I walked slowly down the sidewalk, still barefoot.
There was no one else around— the neighbors had gone home, the damaged cars had been driven off.
There were no singing night bugs to mitigate the strained suburban silence, no signs of life.
Now, a season later, Joel’s hair is a little longer, the curls as touchably unruly as ever, more gray in them than I remember. He still takes up space in the same way: big and easy, his shoulders rounding the slightest bit. I feel like I haven’t seen him in a year. In five years.
I stand up. I think I have a smear of blood on my pants, from cleanup.
“You’ve met?” says Rahim, somewhere in the background. “At another birth?”
“Yes,” I say, and Joel says the same thing half a second later. He sounds surprised, remembering, as though it can’t really have been that obvious and ordinary an origin story. Strange that it is.
“That’s awesome!” Tamar manages to be enthusiastic toward us even in the middle of her monumental day.
Or maybe this is the overflow of her excitement—she wants to gush over everything, she has a surplus of love.
“I actually feel like you should know each other. You’re both the nicest people.
You should be friends.” There is a sliver of hesitation in her voice before she finishes the sentence.
Maybe friends is not quite the word she was thinking.
Maybe there is something rising from below the surface of our interaction, a murky leviathan.
Joel clears his throat. “That’s very kind.” He shifts his focus off me. “How’s this little one doing?”
“Amazing!”