14. Allison
ALLISON
Istare at the phone after he’s gone. His name sits at the top of the screen a little longer, and then the screen goes dark, and I’m looking at my face in the black glass.
Both. When Gavin says both, he means work. He’s meant work every time since I’ve known him, and some stupid part of me still thought today would be the day the word meant me. The hurt and the anger burn right under my breastbone, and I press my fist there.
The next contraction doesn’t care about any of it.
It starts in my back and wraps all the way around to the front, and I grab the bed rail and breathe the way the nurse showed me, in through my nose and out through my mouth, slow enough that I don’t turn into one long scared noise.
On the monitor my son’s heartbeat keeps skipping along, quick and steady.
It’s the only thing in this room I trust.
When it lets go, the nurse tucks the belt back into place over my belly. “Do you want your friend back in?”
Mom’s still somewhere on the east road. My husband’s about to walk onto a stage in a hangar on the other side of the ocean. Scott’s sitting in a plastic chair in the hall in a wet tie.
“Yes,” I say. “Please.”
He comes in carrying a paper cup of ice chips and looking like he’d rather be dealing with a burst irrigation main. He sets the cup down on the tray and stays by the wall.
“Police turned your mom around at the east road,” he says. “She’s trying the north route. I asked her how long, and she said the question offended her.”
That’s Mom, all right. I almost laugh, and then another contraction starts building, and I hold my hand out without thinking about it.
He looks at it for a second like he’s checking it’s really meant for him.
Then he takes it. His palm is rough from work and warm from the cup, and his grip is steady.
“You can squeeze,” he says.
“I’ll break your fingers.”
“I’ve got another hand.”
I squeeze. I don’t break anything, but it isn’t for lack of trying.
The TV in the corner has been on with the sound off since I got here, cycling through radar maps and roads that look like rivers. Sometime in the afternoon the picture changes. There’s a red banner across the bottom, and then there’s my husband.
He’s stepping down off a little stage in a hangar, in the charcoal suit he saves for the big days, with a shiny white jet behind him and people in the crowd holding up champagne.
Rebecca’s beside him. Gold letters crawl under them: CALLAHAN AIR OPENS IN LONDON.
The camera catches the moment her hand lands on his arm and freezes there while the anchor talks about New York money going overseas. My ears start roaring.
There’s no kiss, and there’s never needed to be one. She’s standing next to him at the party he picked, and I’m lying in a hospital bed with the baby he left.
Scott reaches for the remote. He looks at me, and I nod, and he turns it off.
My phone starts ringing on the tray table. It’s Gavin. I watch his name buzz across the table until a contraction blurs it, and Scott doesn’t touch it, and neither do I. It stops, and a little red dot shows up over my voicemail.
Dr. Shah checks me and says I’ve made progress, and I tell her it feels like I should’ve made a lot more.
“Labor has very little respect for math,” she says, and I decide she’s my favorite person in the building.
She watches the monitor through the next contraction, and I watch her watching it, so I see his heart rate dip before it climbs right back up. Terror hits me so fast my vision goes gray at the edges.
“What was that?”
“He’s moving down, and he’s getting squeezed. He came right back.” She puts her hand on my knee. “I’m watching him. If I get worried, you’ll be the first to know.”
I believe her, because she hasn’t promised me one thing she can’t deliver.
Mom walks in a while later with rain in her hair and one pant leg soaked to the knee. “The east road,” she announces, “is a disgrace to this county.”
Then she sees my face, and hers crumples. She comes straight to the bed and kisses my forehead and holds it there.
“I’m here,” she says.
Scott starts to let go of my hand and back toward the door, and I tighten my grip before I can think about whether I should.
“Stay,” I say.
He looks at Mom before he answers. Mom looks at me, then at our hands, and nods once.
“Okay,” Scott says, and he stays.
The afternoon turns into a long gray smear.
I ask for the epidural, and nobody hands me a medal for waiting as long as I did.
That seems fair. The anesthesiologist makes Mom and Scott stand in front of me while I curl around my belly and hold still through a contraction, and he tells me very seriously not to move.
I think about explaining that I haven’t had any say over my body for months.
Then the next contraction hits, and I save my energy for hating everyone quietly.
The medicine takes the sharp edge off. It doesn’t make the room peaceful.
Nurses keep coming in to check my blood pressure and his heart.
Somebody wheels in a little warming bed with a light over it and tells me again that the baby team will be here because he’s early.
My phone rings, and later it rings again.
Mom turns it face down on the tray without asking me.
If I listen to one of his messages and he says he’s coming, I’ll believe him for half a second, and I can’t afford half a second on another promise from him today.
It’s dark outside when the pressure starts, low and heavy even through the epidural. Dr. Shah checks me, looks at the nurse, and says, “Let’s get ready to push.”
The room fills up with people, calmly and fast. A nurse from the baby team switches on the warming bed.
Somebody raises the end of mine and turns on a light that takes away any dignity I had left.
Mom takes my right hand. Scott keeps my left, because I ask him to, and he looks at my face and nowhere else.
For a moment it’s all so wrong I can’t breathe.
Scott shouldn’t know where to stand. Mom shouldn’t be at my shoulder.
Gavin should be right here asking Dr. Shah too many questions and watching the monitor every time the number changes.
He should be telling me I’m doing great in that low voice he uses when he’s scared and doesn’t want me to know it.
I can see the whole thing, every detail of him in this room.
The spot where he should be stays empty.
“Ready?” Dr. Shah asks.
No. “Yes.”
I push. The first one does nothing at all. The next one feels like I’m being split in half by somebody I already love. The nurse counts, and I’ve come to hate numbers. Mom tells me I can do it. Scott doesn’t say a word until I look at him.
“You’re doing it now,” he says, and I hang on to it with everything I’ve got.
Dr. Shah says she can see dark hair. I start crying and push harder. And then all at once there’s a slippery rush and a weight gone, and my son is born.
He doesn’t make a sound.
I stop breathing. A nurse rubs his back hard while Dr. Shah holds him against my legs, and I can’t see, I can’t move, I’m just waiting.
He lets out one thin, furious cry.
I fall apart. Relief tears out of me in a sob that shakes the bed, and I can’t even see him. Dr. Shah asks Mom if she wants to cut the cord, and Mom looks at me first, and I nod. Her hand shakes around the scissors. The cord’s tougher than she expects, and her mouth falls open when it gives.
The baby nurse whisks him to the warmer and checks him over fast. “He’s breathing well,” she calls. “Good color.”
Then she brings my son to me.
He’s small. I won’t say fragile, because he isn’t.
He’s five pounds, ten ounces, with dark wet hair and a red, squashed face and one fist tucked up under his chin like he’s come prepared to object to all of us.
They lay him on my chest and pile warm blankets over us both, and his skin is hot and damp against mine, and his crying turns into small offended grunts.
My whole body starts shaking, teeth chattering, from shock and relief, and the nurse says that’s normal.
“Hi,” I say. It isn’t nearly enough for the first thing I ever say to my child. It’s all I’ve got. “Hi, Henry.”
Mom’s crying beside me. Scott lets go of my hand and moves back against the wall without anybody having to ask him.
“He’s perfect,” Mom says.
The baby nurse smiles. “He’s doing very well. Perfect’s outside my professional scope.”
“You can borrow it,” Mom tells her.
Henry opens one eye, looks at the general mess of us, and closes it again. He’s been alive a few minutes, and he already knows when a conversation can go on without him.
The nurse helps me bring him to my breast. He opens his mouth, tries once, and falls asleep.
Even that one try sends a sharp cramp low through my belly.
She tells me babies who come early tire out fast and that she’ll help me, and that they’ll be checking his sugar and his temperature and his color over the next few days.
I ask if he has to go to the NICU, and my voice goes up and cracks on it.
“Not right now,” she says. “He stays with you as long as he keeps doing this well.”
Later, when he’s wrapped up in a striped hospital blanket and tucked into the crook of my arm, she asks me for his full name.
Henry’s the only first name that ever felt like his. People will say I picked the last name to punish Gavin. Barrett is the name on the sign over the business I built, and the name of the woman who drove through floodwater to get to him, and the name on the only home he’s had so far.
“Henry Barrett.”
She writes it down. “Father’s name for the chart?”
I have to swallow hard before I can say it. “Gavin Callahan.”
She writes that down too, like it’s any other name.
My phone’s full of missed calls. I don’t open any of them. I tell the patient liaison she can send Gavin one message: Henry’s name, the time he was born, and that we’re both okay. Nothing else.
Scott leaves once he’s sure Henry’s breathing on his own, saying he’ll get the greenhouse opened when the roads are safe.
Mom falls asleep sitting up in the chair with her mouth open.
A nurse pricks Henry’s heel for blood, and he screams, and I cry right along with him, because apparently I’ve given up on having standards.
The epidural’s wearing off, and everything below my waist aches, heavy and bruised.
It gets late. Henry sleeps in the clear plastic bassinet beside me with a knit cap pulled down to his eyebrows. I should be sleeping too. I’m so tired my eyes burn every time I blink.
Instead I pick up my phone. I don’t listen to the voicemails, but I open the flight tracker and find his plane.
It’s still sitting on the ground in England.