Chapter 18
The contractions started at four in the morning, two days before her due date.
She'd been dreaming about plaster. A wall in the Soto house that she'd finished six weeks ago, the green parlor, and in the dream the colorwash was wrong.
Too warm. She was standing on a ladder with a rag and a bucket, trying to correct it, and the wall kept shifting under her hands, and then the shifting became something else entirely.
She woke up with her hand on her belly and a tightening across her lower back that was different from any of the false alarms she'd been having for weeks. This one had teeth.
Xavier was asleep beside her. He slept differently now than he had before. Lighter. Closer. One hand always somewhere on her body, her hip, her shoulder, her wrist. Tonight his hand was on her stomach, which was where it spent most nights, as though he were standing guard.
She put her hand over his. "Xavier."
He was awake instantly. His eyes opened and found hers in the dark. She watched him go from sleep to full alertness in under a second.
"Is it time?"
"I think so."
He was out of bed before she finished the sentence. She heard him moving through the house, fast and purposeful, gathering the bag they'd packed two weeks ago, calling the hospital, starting the car.
Isabelle sat on the edge of the bed and breathed through the second contraction. She put both hands on her belly and said, quietly, "Okay. We're doing this."
The baby moved under her hands. A slow, heavy roll, a movement that had become familiar.
The baby was large now, running out of room, pressing against every organ Isabelle possessed.
She'd stopped being able to see her own feet in August. She'd stopped being able to tie her own shoes shortly after that, and Xavier had started tying them for her every morning, kneeling in the hallway by the front door, his hands quick and careful on her laces.
He came back to the bedroom. "I called your parents and Margaret," he said. “They’re meeting us there."
A contraction hit and Xavier was beside her in an instant, his hand on her back, his other hand holding hers.
"Breathe," he said. "I've got you."
She breathed. The contraction passed. He helped her down the stairs, one step at a time, his arm around her waist, steady, patient.
The drive to the hospital was short. Four in the morning, the streets empty, the city theirs.
Xavier drove with both hands on the wheel, his jaw set and his eyes fixed on the road.
Isabelle could see him concentrating, could see him channeling every ounce of focus he possessed into the task of getting her there safely, and she loved him.
She loved him with a ferocity that the contractions couldn't touch, a love that had been tested, broken, rebuilt and was stronger now in the broken places, the way a bone heals thicker where it fractured.
"You're doing great," she said.
"I'm driving. You're the one doing the work."
"I mean in general. You're doing great in general."
He glanced at her. "Thank you," he said. "For letting me be here."
"You were always going to be here."
“Not in the way I wanted. I almost lost this."
"But you didn't."
"I didn't." He reached over and took her hand. He found her pulse with his thumb. "I didn't."
At the hospital, they were taken to a room. Isabelle changed into a gown. The contractions were coming faster now, eight minutes apart, then six, and each one required her full attention, her whole body bracing against the wave of it.
The labor lasted fourteen hours. Xavier stayed for every minute.
He held her hand through the contractions that made her scream and the ones that made her go silent, which were worse.
He fed her ice chips. He rubbed her back.
He told her she was strong, she was brave and she was going to be an extraordinary mother.
When she told him to shut up during a contraction so intense it whited out her vision, he shut up and held on and didn't take it personally.
And finally, their baby was born. A girl.
She arrived screaming. Furious. Red-faced and flailing, her fingers curled into fists, her cry filling the room with a sound so alive it erased everything else. The doctor placed her on Isabelle's chest, warm, wet and impossibly light.
Isabelle looked down at her daughter and the world rearranged itself around a single point.
"Oh," Isabelle said. Just that. Just oh.
Because there was nothing else. Every word she knew, every sentence she'd ever constructed, every conversation she'd ever had was inadequate for this.
Her daughter was on her chest. Her daughter's eyes were open, dark and unfocused, looking up at Isabelle's face with an expression of total bewilderment, as though she'd arrived somewhere unexpected and was trying to decide what she thought about it.
"Hi," Isabelle whispered. "Hi, Rosalie. It's me. I'm your mom."
The name came to her, unbidden. As if the name was always meant for her daughter.
She looked at Xavier, whose beautiful green eyes were filled with tears.
He was looking down at his daughter with an expression that demolished every version of Xavier Grant that had ever existed and replaced them all with this one: a father. Undone, reborn.
“Rosalie,” he said. His voice was destroyed. “It’s perfect. Bella… look at her."
"I see her."
"She's perfect."
"She's perfect."
He leaned down and pressed his mouth against Isabelle's forehead, then against Rosalie's head, the dark damp hair.
Later, after their visitors—Margaret, Jonathan, her parents, and then Douglas—had gone, when the nurses had done their checks and dimmed the lights, Isabelle lay in the hospital bed with Rosalie asleep on her chest. Xavier was beside her in the chair he'd pulled as close as it would go, his head resting on the mattress near her hip, one hand on the baby's back.
"Xavier."
"Hmm."
"We did it."
He lifted his head. "You did it," he said.
"We did it." She reached for him with her free hand. He took it, held it and pressed his thumb against her pulse, gently, that old habit, and she let him. "All of it. Everything. We did it."