Epilogue TESSA
Epilogue
Tessa
I wake at ten past two with Ronan’s hand on my stomach, and for one confused second I think that’s what woke me.
Then it comes back. Deep, wrapping around into my back, a slow tightening that turns mean halfway through, and I lie very still and breathe until it lets go.
Beside me, Ronan lifts his head. “Tessa.”
I can’t answer yet. His hand spreads wider.
When I can, I say, “It’s started.”
He’s out of that bed so fast I laugh, and the laugh turns into something else halfway through, and by the time I can talk again he’s crouched in front of me with both hands on my knees and his phone already in one of them.
“Don’t,” I tell him.
“Don’t what.”
“Become you yet.”
“I am me.”
The next one starts, and he watches the clock over my shoulder, and when it lets go he says, “Twenty-two.”
He’s dressed in about ninety seconds, and then he’s back down in front of me with my shoes in his hand.
“I need ten minutes.”
“You don’t have ten minutes.”
“But I had a plan.” I hear how it sounds and say it anyway. “Ronan, I need to shower. I need to shave. You have seen me.”
“You can shower there.”
“It’s not the same and you know it’s not the same.”
He doesn’t argue. He puts my shoes on for me instead, one and then the other, because I haven’t been able to reach my own feet since the spring.
Then he takes the bag out to the car. Comes back for my pillow. Goes out again with a bottle of water I haven’t asked for, and then again to check the car seat he installed in April.
Thirty seconds later he’s back in the bedroom.
I look at him. “That’s four times.”
“I know.”
“Why?”
His eyes flick to me.
“Because you’re in here.”
Another one starts. He sees it before I say anything and crosses the room and gets down in front of me, his hand closed around mine until it lets go. “Twenty,” he says.
“I know.”
“Tessa. Car.”
He gets a hand under my arm and gently brings me up off the bed.
Then there’s warm water running down my leg, under the hem of his T-shirt, onto the floor between us.
He looks down at it, then up at me.
* * *
I’ve held hands while bones were set. I’ve talked people through chest tubes and burns and the first terrible minutes after they surface and remember what happened. I have said breathe more times than I could possibly count.
Somewhere on the drive south, with another one climbing through me and his hand locked around mine, I decide I owe an apology to every woman I have ever coached through this.
“Don’t tell me to breathe.”
“I didn’t.”
“You were going to.”
“I decided against it.”
“You had the face.”
“I’m driving.”
“I know.” I put my head back against the seat. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be.” His thumb moves over my knuckles. “Twenty more minutes. Hang on to me.”
He doesn’t let go of my hand the whole way in. Neither do I.
* * *
At six in the morning I’m four centimeters. At ten I’m five. At one in the afternoon I’m still five, and I inform my husband that I’m going home.
“I hate this bed.”
“I’ll buy the hospital a better one.”
I turn my head to look at him, and he’s completely serious, and I laugh until it turns into a groan and he’s on his feet with my hand in both of his.
Sadie turns up at three, takes one look at me, and doesn’t leave. She has spent eight months trying to get the sex of this baby out of us. Ronan and I decided at the first scan that we wanted the surprise, and Sadie has never once accepted that as an answer.
By six I’ve stopped being a nurse.
I have said the words a thousand times—you’re doing beautifully, that’s it, stay with me—and not one of them is in my head now. There’s no distance left to stand back at. There’s a body doing something enormous without consulting me, a monitor I’ve stopped looking at, and Ronan.
That’s the whole world by six o’clock. His hand. His voice. His face every time I open my eyes.
He can’t buy this or hurry it or send anybody an email. There is nothing here for him to run.
He stays anyway. Every hour of it.
And somewhere in the worst of it I open my eyes and see it—his eyes flicking to the monitor and back to me.
He isn’t calm. He hasn’t been calm since two o’clock this morning.
A little before nine somebody checks me and says the number I have been waiting all day for.
Ten centimeters.
Ronan gets in behind my shoulders and takes my whole weight every time they tell me to push, and lowers me back down after, and does it again, and again, and does not once let anybody swap with him.
Somebody counts to ten. Somebody counts to ten again. I push until there is nothing left, and they tell me to do it again, and I hate every single person in this room except one.
It takes hours.
“I can’t do this.”
“Yes, you can.”
I shake my head. I’m crying and I can’t stop and I don’t care who sees it.
“I can’t.”
“Tessa—”
“I can’t, I can’t, I can’t.”
I look up at him and his face has gone to pieces, this man, for about half a second before he gets it back.
Then something changes in the room.
The monitor by my head makes a sound I don’t like, and the numbers on it come down, and the nurse beside me reaches past my head for the wall.
“Let’s get her over on her side.”
They roll me. A doctor comes through a door I never heard anybody call for, and a second one behind her, and there are more people in this room than there were a minute ago. Somebody puts a cuff on my arm and doesn’t take it off again.
“What’s happening?” Ronan asks.
Nobody answers him.
“What is happening, goddamn it.”
“Baby doesn’t love the contractions.” The doctor doesn’t look up from the strip. “Mom’s pressure’s come down too. We’re watching both.”
Then, to the room and not to us: “Let’s get this baby out.”
Ronan’s head comes round to me.
Somebody reads the hours since my water went off the chart. Somebody else writes it down.
Nobody says any of it to me. They don’t have to.
I know what the numbers are. I know what we’re watching it means, and I know what the next sentence is if they don’t come back up.
I also know I have nothing left to give any of them.
I’m so tired I can’t hold my own head up. The room is loud and none of it is reaching me and I can feel myself going somewhere further back, somewhere quiet, where all of this is happening to somebody else.
“Tessa.”
I don’t answer him.
“Tessa.”
His hand comes onto my face and turns my head until I’m looking at him.
He’s white. Jaw working, and for the first time since two o’clock this morning he isn’t hiding a single thing from me.
Then his forehead is against mine.
“Look at me.”
I do.
“You are the strongest person I have ever known.”
I shake my head.
“If I could take this off you I’d do it right now. All of it. Without thinking about it for one second.” His hand closes hard around mine. “I can’t. So I need you to do it. For me, and for our baby.”
“Ronan—”
His voice drops. “One. Give me one.”
Another one starts.
“Okay, Tessa.” From the end of the bed. “You know what to do.”
His thumb moves under my eye. “Still with me?”
I look up at him, and something in me gets back up off the floor.
“Always,” I whisper.
“That’s it.”
And then there’s a sound in the room that I have heard other women make, and it takes me a second to understand that it’s mine.
* * *
June Marjorie Sinclair is born at 11:42 that night.
Eight pounds six ounces. Dark hair. Red all over, and creased, and howling.
They put her on my chest and I can’t see properly for crying.
“Hi,” I whisper. “Hi, June.”
I look for Ronan and he’s right there, of course he is, and he isn’t saying anything at all. I have seen that face exactly once before, in our kitchen, with his hand flat on my stomach and no words anywhere in him.
“Ronan.”
His eyes come up to mine. Wet, and he has to swallow before anything else happens, and then he’s smiling wider than I have ever seen him smile.
“She’s here,” I tell him.
He bends and kisses me. Then he puts one enormous hand over the whole of her back.
“Hi, June.”
* * *
I wake up and don’t know what time it is.
The room is dark except for the light over the sink.
Sadie came back and cried over her niece and then hugged her brother until he told her to stop, and she didn’t.
My mother came with flowers and a bag of things nobody needs yet, and held her for what I’d guess was about four minutes longer than Ronan wanted.
My brothers came with balloons. Somebody took photographs. Somebody brought coffee nobody drank.
Now it’s quiet, and I turn my head and find Ronan in the chair with our daughter in his arms.
I don’t say anything. I just watch him.
She’s bundled against his chest with her face turned in, and he looks absurd holding something that small, and he has not looked away from her once.
And I am not expecting what comes next. Love first, and then underneath it something that isn’t only love. Three hours after all of that—wrecked, stitched, flat on my side in a hospital bed—and I want my husband so badly it hurts.
He feels me looking. His eyes come up.
“Hey,” he says, quiet, so he doesn’t wake her.
“Hey.”
“How are you feeling?”
“Lonesome.”
He smiles at that.
Then he’s up out of the chair, slow, and the bed dips, and he starts to hand her over to me.
“Don’t.” I get a hand up. “Don’t move her.”
He stops.
“You two look—”
I can’t finish it.
So he lifts his free arm instead. “Come here.”
I get myself in under it and put my head on his shoulder. His arm comes around me, and I reach across and rest my hand on June’s belly.
There.
All three of us.
He kisses the top of my head. “You were incredible.”
I laugh a little. “I was a mess.”
“No.” His arm tightens around me. “I watched you hurt for twenty-one hours and couldn’t do a damn thing about it.”
I tip my face up.
His eyes hold mine.
“I’m so proud of you.”
That gets me. I tuck my face into his shoulder.
June makes a small sound between us and one fist works its way out of the blanket.
Ronan gives her his little finger, and her whole hand closes around it.
I have never been this tired in my life. I have never been this happy.
“I love you.”
“I love you.” His mouth comes down on my hair. “Sleep.”
I close my eyes against his chest.
Some time later, something pulls me awake.
Low, under my ear.
My father’s song.
THE END